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HardwareVitals

Printer test page

Everything worth checking on one sheet: the four inks, a grey ramp, hairlines down to five hundredths of a millimetre and type from four point up. Pick your paper and print.

Paper size

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.

Printer test page — all inks, tints, lines and type A4 — 210 × 297 mm · printed at 100% CMYKM+YC+YC+MC+M+YBlack ink, 0 to 100 per cent050100Cyan050100Magenta050100Yellow050100Black050100Line widths, across and down0.05 mm0.1 mm0.2 mm0.3 mm0.5 mmType sizes4 pt — the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog 01234567895 pt — the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog 01234567896 pt — the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog 01234567898 pt — the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog 012345678910 pt — the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog 0123456789 0123456789100123 cm in hardwarevitals.com Printer test page — all inks, tints, lines and type US Letter — 8.5 × 11 in · printed at 100% CMYKM+YC+YC+MC+M+YBlack ink, 0 to 100 per cent050100Cyan050100Magenta050100Yellow050100Black050100Line widths, across and down0.05 mm0.1 mm0.2 mm0.3 mm0.5 mmType sizes4 pt — the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog 01234567895 pt — the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog 01234567896 pt — the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog 01234567898 pt — the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog 012345678910 pt — the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog 0123456789 0123456789100123 cm in hardwarevitals.com

What one sheet can tell you

Read it from the top down. The eight blocks along the head are the four inks alone and the three mixes they are supposed to make; a mix that comes out muddy, streaked or plainly the wrong hue points at whichever ink it contains. Below them the black ramp steps from paper white to solid in ten per cent jumps, and the step where two neighbours stop looking different is where your printer runs out of range.

The line block is the part that ages first. A printer laying down 0.5 mm rules perfectly while dropping the 0.05 mm ones is not broken — it has simply reached its resolution — but one that breaks up 0.2 mm rules across and keeps them down the page has a mechanical problem in the direction of travel.

The ruler is there to be doubted

Hold a real ruler against the scale at the foot of the sheet. If the centimetre marks do not land on centimetres, the page was scaled on its way to the paper and every other measurement above is wrong by the same factor. That is almost always a print dialog set to "fit to page" rather than 100 per cent.

The corner marks are the second check. Three sets are printed at three, six and ten millimetres from each edge; whichever set is missing tells you how much of the paper your printer physically cannot reach.

Which sheet to print next

This page is the overview, and each of the others takes one part of it much further: a page of nothing but fine lines for a blocked head, a page of nothing but greys for banding, a page of geometry for skew. Start here, then follow whichever band looked wrong.

Common questions

What is a printer test page?

A sheet printed specifically to be looked at rather than read — solid ink, tints, fine lines and small type arranged so that a fault in any one of them is obvious against the parts that came out right.

How do I print this at the right size?

Choose your paper above, then print at 100 per cent scale with margins set to none. The sheet already carries its own margin, and a second one from the browser is what forces the page to shrink.

Does printing this use a lot of ink?

This one covers roughly a fifth of the sheet in ink. If you only want to know whether a head is blocked, the nozzle check page uses far less and answers that question better.

The other test sheets

Testing hardware rather than paper

The rest of the site checks the machine in front of you: microphone, webcam, keyboard, controller and screen, all in the browser and none of it uploaded.

Open the hardware tests