HP LJ 200 color M251nw color issues

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[ibe98765]

I recently obtained a used LaserJet 200 color M251nw. I put new cartridges in and the printer works but with a major flaw, which is that all the photo prints I have tested are a few steps darker than what I see on my monitor screen. I have discovered that if I change the gamma setting in the photo software for each photo to print from the 1.00 default to 1.50, I can get a closer match to what I see on the screen.

I have calibrated the color, gone over all settings a number of times, updated all software and firmware to the latest versions and ran the Dr. HP software but have not been able find a solution.

Under Color Management | Devices I have the following selected:
Display: 1. Generic PnP Monitor – NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750

My monitor is an old ACER K242HL

Running Win10 Pro 64bit

I’ve heard that it is possible to calibrate the monitor display to the printer output but can’t seem to find any instructions on how/what to do in this area.

• This topic was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by ibe98765.

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On Laser Jet series, you can run the cleaning program. I suggest you run this program. You can launch it from web server. Just enter IP address of your printer into your browser.

Then go to System > Service. There should be cleaning program for you. Try if this helps.

On the other hand, there is no guarantee, that display and printed page will look the same. It also depends how is your monitor set (brightness, darkness, color temperature,..).

Dell Latitude E6530, Intel Core i5 @ 2.6 GHz, 4GB RAM, W10 20H2 Enterprise

HAL3000, AMD Athlon 200GE @ 3,4 GHz, 8GB RAM, Fedora 29

PRUSA i3 MK3S+

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Did all the cleaning and calibrating.  Doesn’t help.  I used to use HP Color printers when I was a working person and they always had this problem.  Had hopes that it would have been attended to by now but that’s why HP is a company on a steady decline.

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You may have keep tweaking the gamma to get it right…

Creating an ICC profile may be easy to do but it requires investment in more software utilities and hardware.

Does anybody know of software besides CorelDRAW or Photoshop that can generate the required color chart. And the software software to read the chart and convert it to an ICC profile?

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ibe98765

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ICC profiles – this is what I was thinking of but didn’t have the experience to put into words.  But it sounds complicated to get this working.

What I was hoping was that there was some sort of repository for these profiles that I could draw from and try out to see if I could get a print that matches the colors on the screen.

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Sorry for the long wait, there are some paper manufacturers/suppliers that have created ICC profiles for a select few printers. Canon has ICC printer profiles, HP does not supply any for their paper*.

I also do not know if HP installs ICC profiles for their paper types with their drivers, so that when one kind of paper is selected the right profile is used to print a picture.

You may have to switch your paper supplier or even your printer to get any help with finding ICC profiles.

*(Yes I did double check that post. If you have a Canon or Epson printer you can download ICC profiles! (You may have to take advisement from the accepted solution and try that method.) If you have an HP industrial printer you can get help with ICC profiles. If you have a DesignJet you can buy a kit that will create an ICC profile. Some sites supply profiles for a very few select models of HP DesignJets or PhotoSmart printers or Epson.)

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Or possibly even better there are services that will provide a custom ICC printer profile.

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Found the software: The open source Argyll Color Management System. I may try this software myself. 🙂

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PCMag and Lifewire have how-to articles about color calibration.

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Older monitors usually have a gamma of around 1.8. Tweak the gamma for the printer even more to see if that helps.

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The problem with gamma tweaking is that it has to be done individually for each and every photo that I want to print, which gets real old quickly.

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