What do these printer settings do?

February 21, 2010 10:19 AM

Anyone know what these laser printer driver settings do?

I have a Samsung CLP-315W printer and I've been unable to figure out what some of its driver settings actually do. The manual makes no mention of them, and my contacts with the manufacturer have been unhelpful--one response was unintelligible while the other was off-topic. I've searched around and posted in another forum and come up empty...

There are four Color settings under Machine Settings--one each for Yellow/Magenta/Cyan/Black. There are dropdowns for each, ranging from -5 to 5.

There's a screenshot here:

http://img99.imageshack.us/img99/4262/samsungcolor.jpg

Color density? Alignment/registration? Something else entirely?

posted by aerotive to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

What a bizarrely awful user interface.

Print a test page. Then set yellow to -5 and cyan to +5. Print another test page. At that point I imagine you will have a good idea of what these settings do. Please let us know.
posted by grouse at 10:51 AM on February 21, 2010

Might also use a test image for this to cut down on ambiguities.
posted by rhizome at 11:11 AM on February 21, 2010 [1 favorite]

They are colour balance adjustments.
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:54 PM on February 21, 2010

Yeah, color balance. If you buy paper that has a slightly bluish tint, for example, It'll tell you to print +5 Magenta. This helps get a consistent color from screen to paper. If you paper doesn't specify, or if your pictures look fine, just leave everything standard.
posted by fontophilic at 2:22 PM on February 21, 2010

Response by poster: Ok I went ahead and tried modifying them , just wanted to be cautious before I screwed anything up. Going negative lightens things, going positive darkens prints. Can be used as a toner saver too I suppose.

Thanks everyone.
posted by aerotive at 6:25 PM on February 21, 2010