Printer Test
Print a real test sheet to check colour accuracy, alignment, greyscale range and nozzle quality, then troubleshoot a printer that's stuck offline.
Printer test sheet
Print this page to check colour accuracy, alignment and detail on your printer.
Colour bars
Greyscale ramp
Alignment crosshairs
Thin line resolution
Text legibility
18pt: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
12pt: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
9pt: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
7pt: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog 0123456789.
5pt: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog 0123456789.
Quick guide: how to use the Printer Test
Takes under a minute- 1Choose the page options you want to verify.
- 2Click Print test page and select your printer.
- 3Set scaling to 100% so alignment marks stay accurate.
- 4Inspect the colour bars, greyscale ramp and text for banding or streaks.
Overview
A printer test page is a purpose-built sheet containing colour bars, a greyscale ramp, alignment marks and text at several sizes, designed to reveal problems that a normal document might hide. Because a regular Word document or PDF usually only uses black text on a white background, it can print perfectly fine even while a printer's cyan or magenta cartridge is nearly empty, or while the print head is slightly misaligned. A dedicated test sheet exposes those issues immediately because it uses every colour and a wide range of line widths in one place.
This page gives you an on-screen test sheet you can send straight to your printer with one click. It includes seven colour bars covering the core CMYK inks plus red, green and blue mixes, an eleven-step greyscale ramp from pure white to pure black, corner and centre alignment crosshairs, a set of progressively thicker vertical lines to check fine detail, and five lines of text shrinking from 18 point down to 5 point to test legibility at small sizes.
Whether you're setting up a new printer, troubleshooting faded or streaky output, or just want to confirm everything is working before printing something important, running this test first takes less than a minute and tells you exactly where to focus your troubleshooting.
Why print quality problems are easy to miss
Most people only notice a printer problem when it affects something they actually care about, like a resume, a boarding pass, or a school project, at which point it's already too late to avoid wasting that print. Running a quick test sheet before an important print job, or on a regular schedule if you print infrequently, catches ink and alignment problems while they're still cheap to fix.
How to read your results
- Colour bars print solid and vivid: ink or toner levels and colour calibration are healthy for every channel shown.
- One or more colour bars are faded, streaky, or missing entirely: that specific cartridge is low, clogged, or not seated properly. Run a nozzle check and cleaning cycle targeting that colour.
- The greyscale ramp has visible banding or repeats the same shade across several steps: this points to a driver colour management issue or a black/grey ink problem rather than a mechanical fault.
- Alignment crosshairs land off-centre or corner marks are clipped: either the print head needs recalibration, or the paper size or margins set in your print dialog don't match the paper actually loaded.
- Thin vertical lines blur together or disappear:the print resolution setting may be too low, or the print head has some clogged nozzles affecting fine detail more than large colour areas.
- Small text becomes unreadable earlier than expected:check the print quality setting in your driver, since Draft or Economy modes often sacrifice fine detail to save ink and print faster.
Troubleshooting
Printer shows offline but is powered on
An offline status almost always means a lost connection, not a hardware failure. Start by restarting the printer itself, since this clears most temporary networking glitches. On the computer, open your printer settings, remove the printer, and add it again so the system re-establishes a fresh connection with the correct address. For network printers, check the printer's own display for its current IP address and confirm it matches what your computer expects; many printers get a new address after a router restart if they're not set to a fixed IP or a DHCP reservation.
Nothing prints and there's no error message
Open the print queue on your computer and look for stuck or paused jobs. A single failed job can block everything behind it in the queue indefinitely. Cancel all pending jobs, then either restart the print spooler service on Windows or restart the computer, and try printing a single page again before queuing anything larger.
Faded, streaky, or missing colours
Run the built-in nozzle check and print head cleaning utility that came with your printer, usually accessible from the printer's own maintenance menu on its screen, or from the manufacturer's desktop software. This clears the vast majority of clogging issues on inkjet printers. If cleaning doesn't help after two or three attempts, the cartridge for that colour is likely empty or has failed and needs replacing.
Printer works from one device but not another
This points to a driver or connection problem on the specific device that's failing, not the printer itself. Reinstall or update the printer driver on the affected device, and confirm it's on the same Wi-Fi network as the printer if you're printing wirelessly, since printers connected to a different network band or a guest network won't be visible to other devices.
Misaligned or cut-off pages
Check that the paper size selected in your print dialog matches what's physically loaded in the tray, since a mismatch causes content to shift or clip even on a perfectly calibrated printer. If the paper size is correct, run the printer's head alignment utility, which prints and scans a calibration pattern to correct any physical misalignment in the print head carriage.
Wireless printer connection issues
Wireless printers are convenient but introduce an extra layer that can fail independently of the printer's mechanical health. If your printer keeps dropping off the network, check whether it's connected to a 2.4GHz or 5GHz band; many budget printers only support 2.4GHz, and if your router has combined both bands under one network name, the printer can sometimes latch onto the wrong one or fail to reconnect after a router reboot.
Printers placed far from the router, or separated by multiple walls or floors, can also experience intermittent connection drops that look like random offline errors. Moving the printer closer to the router, or adding a Wi-Fi extender or mesh node nearby, often resolves connectivity issues that otherwise look like a hardware fault.
If you manage a printer on a shared office or home network, a static IP address or DHCP reservation set in your router prevents the printer's address from changing after a reboot, which is one of the most common causes of a printer suddenly becoming unreachable from computers that had it working fine the day before.
Getting the most out of ink and toner
Running this test sheet occasionally rather than only when something looks wrong helps you catch a slowly clogging nozzle or a nearly empty cartridge before it affects something important. Most inkjet printers also benefit from being used at least every week or two, since ink left sitting unused in the nozzles for long stretches is the single biggest cause of clogs on printers that otherwise work fine.
If you print infrequently, consider switching your default print quality to a slightly higher setting than Draft, since very low quality modes can mask early clogging by using less ink per pass, delaying the point at which you'd notice a problem until it's more severe.
Frequently asked questions
How do I print a test page?
Use the Print test sheet button above to send this page's built-in colour bars, greyscale ramp and alignment marks straight to your printer, or open your operating system's printer settings and choose Print a test page from the printer's properties menu for a driver-generated version.
Why does my printer show as offline when it's turned on?
This almost always means your computer and printer have lost their connection, not that the printer is broken. Common causes include the printer going to sleep and not reconnecting to Wi-Fi, a changed IP address on network printers, a loose USB cable, or a stuck print job jamming the queue. Restarting both devices and removing then re-adding the printer in your system's settings fixes this in most cases.
Why are my printed colours coming out wrong?
Faded or off colours are usually low or clogged ink or toner, an outdated or incorrect print driver, or a colour management setting mismatched between your document and the printer's profile. Run a nozzle check and cleaning cycle from your printer's utility software first, since that resolves the majority of colour problems on inkjet printers.
What is a nozzle check and why does it matter?
A nozzle check prints a small pattern of solid lines in each ink colour so you can see whether every nozzle is firing correctly. Gaps, faded sections, or missing colours in the pattern point to a clogged print head, which a cleaning cycle from your printer's maintenance menu can usually clear.
My printed page is misaligned or the margins are off. What should I check?
Check the alignment crosshairs on the test sheet: if they land noticeably off-centre or the corner marks are cut off, run the printer's built-in head alignment or calibration utility, and confirm the paper size selected in your print dialog matches the paper actually loaded in the tray.
Why won't my printer connect to Wi-Fi?
Most wireless printers lose their connection after a router restart, a password change, or a firmware update. Check the printer's own display or a printed network configuration page for its current IP address and signal strength, and re-run the printer's Wi-Fi setup wizard if it can't find your network at all.
How do I know if it's a driver problem rather than a hardware problem?
If the test sheet on this page prints fine but documents from a specific application don't, or if the printer works from one computer but not another, the issue is almost always software or driver related rather than a physical fault with the printer itself.
Should I use the manufacturer's app or my operating system's built-in printing?
Either works for basic printing, but the manufacturer's own utility software usually gives you access to nozzle checks, head alignment, and ink level details that the generic operating system print dialog doesn't expose.
Why is my print job stuck in the queue and not printing?
A stuck job usually means a previous print failed and is blocking the queue. Open your printer's queue window, cancel all pending jobs, restart the print spooler service (or restart the computer), then try printing again.
Can I test a printer without wasting paper?
Most printer settings apps let you preview the test page or nozzle check pattern that would print, and some let you run a dry alignment check. Otherwise, plain paper is fine for a one-off test since you're only checking calibration, not print quality on your actual media.
Why does text look blurry or smudged when everything else looks fine?
Blurry text at small sizes usually points to a resolution or print quality setting that's too low for the job, or slightly clogged nozzles that show up more clearly on fine detail than on large colour blocks. Check the text legibility section of the test sheet and try a higher quality print setting.