Ghost Printer

[ginnet]

I have had an unusual occurance with my printer and I would welcome any comments from members before I contact the manufacturer.
The printer in question is a Lexmark X5250 all-in-one.
Last week I reformatted my drives quite a few times whilst testing a new programme_I had omitted to remove my printers USB and power connections as it had no bearing on the test I was doing.
However during one restartup my printer suddenly printed out a gif image even though no printer drivers were even installed on a newly reformatted blank drive.
On examination of the image it turned out to be one that I had printed directly from an Ecard site for a Mother's Day gift and it was NEVER stored at all anywhere on my computer.
That was over 2 months ago_March 18th to be precise.
Also the paper that this image was printed on was perforated as I had run out of new A4 paper and this fact eliminates any possibility of me having a previous copy lying around.
This has me totally baffled as the only place this image could have been stored was actually in the printer's memory itself and as such could spell serious implications for all kinds of users of these printers.
We tried to analyse the printer's programme but the assembly language is in Chinese so no luck there.
Has anyone anywhere ever experienced this phenomenon or have I gone completely crackers altogether ?

Jimicron

 

[bmxfreakrider]

I have had that happen to our HP OfficeJet v40. i was just sitting there, and this printer spit out an english report that i typed up like 6 months earlier, and it wasnt even hooked up, just power, no phone, or usb.

its trippy, i know some of the more recent printers have ram, and in some cases flash memory, but why would it just randomly print it? electromagnetic interference? or maybe its just a fault in the programming in which after an "x" amount of time it is programmed to clear the cache in the printer, but some how it was executed incorrectly and printed it instead.

just some food for thought.

but yea, i dont think thats its a big deal, but if it does it repeatedly and starts wasting your ink/paper then have it replaced. and if it happens to all users of the printer (at least 70%) then there might be either a recall, or a firmware update for it (i highly doubt it, but if its possible, then they would do it because its way cheaper to install a bit of code than to replace an entire printer)