Blurry or Smeared Printout

If your printouts are blurry or smeared, try these solutions:

• Make sure your paper is not damp, curled, old, or loaded incorrectly in your product.
• Use a support sheet with special paper, or load special paper one sheet at a time.
• Make sure your paper meets the specifications for your product.
• Use Epson papers to ensure proper saturation and absorption of genuine Epson inks.
• Make sure the paper type setting in your product software matches the type of paper you loaded.
• Make sure you loaded the printable side of the paper correctly for your product.
• If you are printing on thick paper or envelopes, turn on the Thick Paper setting from the control panel or select Thick Paper and Envelopes in the Extended Settings of the printer software. (Turning this setting on will decrease print speed.)
• Remove each sheet from the output tray as it is printed.
• Avoid handling printouts on glossy paper right after printing to allow the ink to set.
• Turn off any high speed settings in your product software.
• If you print on both sides of a sheet of paper, smudges may appear on the reverse side of heavily saturated or dark images. If one side of a sheet will contain a lighter image or text, print that side first. Adjust the density and/or ink drying time settings.
• The ink levels may be low and you may need to refill the ink. Visually check the ink levels.
• Run a nozzle check to see if any of the print head nozzles are clogged. Then clean the print head, if necessary.
• Align the print head.
• Clean the paper path.
• If you printed when the ink levels were too low to be seen in the ink tank windows, refill the ink tanks to the upper lines and run the Power Cleaning utility. Then run a nozzle check to see if print quality has improved.
• If you have not used the product for a long time, run the Power Cleaning utility.
  Note: Power Cleaning consumes a lot of ink, so run this utility only if you cannot improve print quality by cleaning the print head.