Printer only works in 600 dpi
 

I have a Samsung (i.e cheap) laser printer connected to the parallel port of a Redhat 9 machine.

I installed the printer drivers using the KDE printer wizard. The printer works fine (test pages print, Open Office prints etc) if I print at 600 dpi. However, if I print at any lower resolution (such as 300 dpi) the printing looks terrible. Bit difficult to describe what happens on the other resolutions, but if for example I try to print just the word "Test" in a new document, The word Test prints twice in faintly and then there are black bands printing down the page. The black bands are about 1 cm thick and 1 cm apart (about 0.4 inches).

I searched on linuxprinting.org and google and couldn't find this particular problem. As far as I can tell from my searching this Samsung model (ML-1210) should work fine at 300 dpi as well as 600 under linux.

Many thanks for your help.

I'm using an ML1210 as well and print out at 300dpi look crap as well on my mandrake 9.1. installation (though I don't normally get those bands you describe; I've seen them but cannot reproduce them). It doesn't help you but maybe it's a consolation :)
Is there a particular reason to print at 300dpi if you can print at 600dpi? The printer doesn't even seem faster at 300dpi.

Thanks for you reply. Sounds like an issue with 300 dpi with this printer.

The only reason for wanting to print at 300 is habit I guess. I'm used to printing 'normal' stuff at 300 and only using 600 for presentations etc. I'll just use the toner save button to achieve the same thing :)