hp b9180 banding fix

The HP B9180 is a great printer… except when it’s not. Watching it go on the fritz, munching its way through expensive consumables is one of the most frustrating feelings in the computer world.

One common problem is this annoying band that gets printed near the top or bottom of the page. The HP solution is decidedly unhelpful — “oh, output error? just use more consumables! good luck!

My woes started when a single ink cartridge (or a “pen” in HP parlance) ran out of ink. What should have been a simple bog-standard replacement turned into three hours of printhead cleaning hell, streaks, and the horrifying band. Now, I’m driving the printer with a relatively ancient machine (1.25GHz ppc Mac mini with 1GB memory, OS X 10.4, and Lightroom/CS2) but the thing is, I’ve made plenty of prints previously without the annoying band without changing any of the software so my first instinct was that there was a problem in the printer.

This was with HP brand paper (Advanced HP Photo Paper 8.5×11″ soft-gloss) and using the main paper tray. The paper is moderately heavy — 250 g/m² or 66 lb.

Various tips on the web suggest avoiding HP’s Photoshop plugin or turning off the printer’s color management and using Photoshops or possibly just maybe avoiding the print spooler, but nothing worked. I probably burned through $30 of consumables just to make one stupid print.

In the end, I found a combination that worked — putting the paper into the special media tray and printing directly from Lightroom. No more band.

I suspect the rollers have an issue with the weight of the paper or something mechanically weird like that. The special media tray has a straight feed path for the paper vs. having to curl the paper around for the main tray. I haven’t tested using CS2 and the HP plugin with this workaround, but my suspicion is that it will work just fine.

Oh, some people out there claim you need to clean the NEDD. I did that too, and it didn’t really help my banding issue, although it did help with a dirty printhead issue. Note that the instructions on that HP page are wrong — to get the print carriage to move out to the left, hold the Ok button, not the On button.