First, let us cover some of the symptoms your Lexmark printer might be showing, and for which cleaning the printhead has proven to be an adequate solution. If your printhead needs cleaning, most likely symptoms include streaks in the print jobs, as well as blurry or faint text being printed out. This is a fairly common issue affecting all makes and models of printers. Here is how you can quickly and easily clean a Lexmark printer printhead.
How to Clean Lexmark Printer Printhead
The printhead is most efficiently cleaned by using supplied software which can initiate the cleaning procedure on your part. To do this, make sure that your printer is loaded with at least a couple of sheets of paper and try to find the Lexmark Solutions Center software suite. If it is not installed, try to grab it online, or install it from the CD media that came with your printer, also containing the drivers for it. We would recommend getting the software online as you will get the most up-to-date version of it. For more detail on this issue, refer to the official Lexmark Printer Manual related to your printer model.
Once you install the software suite, open it up and look for the Maintenance tab which contains procedures related to this particular issue. Inside there should be an option to first test the printer so that you confirm it needs attention or not. If the test page comes out blurry, fuzzy, or has streaks and skipped lines, proceed with the printhead cleaning procedure within the software suite.
If the printouts come out bad intermittently, chances are your ink cartridges are not working properly. When using cheap and low-quality cartridges this is a fairly common issue so consider replacing those with genuine Lexmark ones.
Hopefully, we managed to help you out at least temporarily. To fix this problem permanently, check out our upcoming article covering this topic fully.