Grayscale gradient test
A continuous ramp for spotting bands, twenty-one measured steps for naming where they start, both ends expanded one point at a time, and a cast check.
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.
Two ramps, two different jobs
The continuous strip is for finding a fault: a printer that bands lays a smooth ramp down as visible stripes, and stripes are far easier to see against a gradient than against a flat. The stepped strip below it is for naming that fault. Once the continuous strip has shown you roughly where things go wrong, the stepped one tells you it happens between sixty and sixty-five per cent, which is a number you can quote and compare after a repair.
The two ends are where printers give up
A ramp that behaves across the middle can still fail at its ends, so the last two strips expand ten per cent of the range each into eleven steps. At the light end, look for the first step that is distinguishable from bare paper: that is the lightest tone your printer can hold, and everything paler than it will disappear from a photograph. At the dark end, find the step beyond which nothing gets darker — that is where shadow detail stops.
Grey made two different ways
The last block prints the same eleven greys twice: once from black ink, once from cyan, magenta and yellow together. The upper row should be neutral. The lower row is what happens when a driver builds greys out of colour inks, and any tint you can see in it — green, pink, warm brown — is the cast that ends up on every black and white document printed with that setting left on.
Common questions
What causes banding in a printed gradient?
Usually a partly blocked nozzle leaving a stripe at the pitch of the head, or paper advancing unevenly between passes. The nozzle check page separates the two: if its lines are complete, the fault is feed rather than ink.
How many grey steps should be visible?
All twenty-one on a healthy printer with normal quality on decent paper. Draft mode and very absorbent paper both collapse the ends first, so count the steps you can tell apart and compare that number rather than judging one print alone.
The greys have a colour tint. What is wrong?
The driver is composing them from colour inks instead of black. Look for a black-ink-only or greyscale option in the print settings; the lower row of the last block on this sheet shows what that setting produces.