Printer Test

This is a sample document you can print in A4 to test your printer's capabilities, ink quality, the printable area, printing resolution, and so on.

  1. Open this PDF file in a PDF viewer.

    Built-in PDF viewers of browsers, for example, produce terrible output, even if you have a decent printer. If you want to check your printer, not the PDF viewer, use a decent PDF viewer, like Foxit PDF Reader or Acrobat Reader.

  2. Print it

    In the print dialog, you need to set:

    This ensures that the A4 size PDF is attempted to print to the whole size of the paper. The area where the printer cannot pint, simply will be left empty. This is what you need for measuring.

  3. Check the result
    1. Check the non-printable area (margin). For example, in order to find the size of the left margin, find the first complete vertical line and check the corresponding number. On the image, the margin is 4mm. Ink is not placed on the paper closer to the left edge than 4 millimeters.
    2. Printing resolution. Check the black-and-white bars printed vertically and horizontally and the checkboard patterns. You can see how thin lines your printer is able to print without merging them.
    3. Check the rainbow. It runs through the whole visible light spectrum. The smoother the transition is, the better the printer is. The top image shows a barred poor quality print, the below picture shows a nice smooth transition.
    4. Check the vertical grey bar. Similarly to the rainbow, it should not display any sudden shade changes. There should be a smooth continuous transition from black to white.
    5. Check the moire. The grey circle should show 360 individual radial lines starting from the centre of the circle. The more moire you can see, the worse the print quality is. The left image shows string moire (bad quality) while the right one has almost no moire at all (good quality).
    6. Check the color pie slices. It should show the 6 basic colors in the slices (red-green-blue and cyan-magenta-yellow) each transitioning from black to white. There shouldn't be any steep changes.
    7. Check the large solid blocks of the four base colours. They should show no imperfections, like blushes, spots, bars, darker or brighter areas. All the four shades should be consistent.