I got a Brother HL-1440 Personal Laser printer for free. It warms up, I put paper in and it prints fine, but there is black toner residue covering the whole page.

Heres a scan of a printout sample


I dont know what else to do. Can anyone help me with fixing this?

The printer was manufactured in September 2002, if that helps.

So it's a 4.5 year old laser printer that you got for free. How/where did you get it? Did you find it on the street, in a dumpster, from a friend or relative, a contest that gave away crappy stuff...?
The only thing I can think of is to contact the manufacturer through the website. I personally think you're SOL.

I got it from my brother, and he got it from the tenants of our rental house. He was going to blow it up.


Do you think that getting a new drum would help?

I personally am not familiar enough with printers in general to differentiate parts from one another, but if you're willing to spend the money on replacement parts I think that would be fine. I think it would be less time consuming and cheaper to simply by a brand new Brother laser printer. I see from your attached image that it's black and white and those are much cheaper than the color ones. You could likely get one for ~$100 or so. It's up to you.

I'd start with a new toner cartridge. a lot of times they will start to wear out and dump extra toner.

Not sure if that printer has one but some laser printers have a density control that can help with problems like this try turning it down.

I ran the Brother 'Printer Information' applet and this was the result.

Often that will happen when your change the toner with something that's not original (toner not made by the same manufacturer as the printer) or when someone tried to use a refill kit.

The best thing to do is to buy an original Brother toner catridge that's meant for that printer, then remove the old catridge, remove the drum (usually with Brother printers it's the tray that you put the toner in), and get yourself a can of compressed dry air and blow the crap out of the insides of the printer. Once you've completely cleaned out the insides of the printer, blow compressed air all over and into the drum assembly. Insert the new catridge and things should end up back to normal.

Agree, I thinks it's toner. Leaking toner can cause all that mess. May have to clean up a little bit inside as well. go online to find out how to clean and install new toner.

I printed a blank sheet, and it still had black s**t on it.

Which further supports what me and spacesurfer said, you need to clean your printer and get fresh, original, toner.

first clean the cartridges if ur printer has that option. mine was doing that same thing too after i hadnt used it for about a year. i cleaned them and now it works fine. if it doesnt work then try what was suggested above.

I got this printer for free, but it had been sitting in my brothers car, in Ohio tempatures for a week, plus it could of not been used in years, I don't know.
I'll see if i can get new toner + drum kit.

Uh... do the words Laser Printer mean anything to you?