Color printer test page
Six large flats, three tint ramps and five reference patches. Big areas of flat ink are where banding and streaking show; small swatches hide both.
Print at 100 per cent with margins set to none — the sheet carries its own 10 mm margin, and a second one from the browser is what makes a printer shrink the page.
Why the blocks are this big
A printer that has begun to band lays down a flat area as a series of faint stripes at the pitch of the print head. Across a swatch the size of a postage stamp there is not enough area for a stripe to repeat, so the swatch looks fine. Across sixty millimetres it cannot hide, which is why each block on this sheet is roughly a third of the width of the page.
Look along the blocks rather than at them. Banding is a rhythm, and the eye catches a rhythm in peripheral vision far better than it catches one patch being slightly lighter than another.
Reading the tint ramps
Each ramp steps one ink from nothing to solid in twenty-one stages. A healthy ramp changes at every step; a printer low on that ink jumps from pale to solid somewhere in the middle and prints several neighbouring steps identically. Note the two percentages either side of the jump, because after a head clean you can print the sheet again and compare the same numbers.
What a browser can and cannot send
Every patch here is specified as an ink mix where the browser understands device CMYK, and as the closest screen equivalent where it does not. Even then the driver has the last word: it may convert, add its own profile, or lay down three inks where one was asked for. So this sheet answers "does each ink lay down evenly and in the right places", not "is this hue accurate to a standard" — the second question needs a measuring instrument, not a page.
Common questions
Why do the printed colours not match my screen?
A screen emits light and a printer absorbs it, so the two cannot cover the same range. Saturated cyan and orange are the usual casualties. A difference in vividness is normal; a difference in hue direction, or a patch missing entirely, is not.
One ink is completely missing. What does that mean?
Either that cartridge is empty or its nozzles are blocked. Print the nozzle check page: if the missing ink also drops its lines there, it is a head problem rather than an empty tank.
Should I print this on plain or photo paper?
Plain paper for a health check, because that is what you print on daily and its faults show sooner. Photo paper for judging what the printer is capable of at its best.