How to get rid of that Black line on a fax or Scanned document

If you ever wonder why your faxes end up at the destination with a black line running down the page that was not on the original or if you made a copy from your all-in-one machine and wonder where that black line came from, well wonder no more.

It's time to learn how to clean your fax/copier. This will only take a few seconds, nothing to disassemble. Just some cleaner and a soft cloth. Any fax/copier that has a document feeder usually has a strip of glass before the flatbed scanning area. This strip of glass needs to be cleaned regularly. If you do not clean it, any piece of dirty that settles there will translate a long black line running down the length of your copy or faxed page. If you look at the two pictures below, the area outlined in yellow is the document feeder scanning area. This is the area you need to keep clean. You can see that this is very similar between different types of machines. One is on a HP 2840 color laser jet and the other is on a Lanier LD238c office scanner - fax - copier - document server.

Keep that glass clean and you'll keep those annoying black lines off your scans and copies!


One last note, if you have a very entry level scanner/fax machine with a document feeder, sometimes those models may not have the extra strip of glass and the document feeder will be lined up with the leading edge of the flatbed scanner glass. in either case make sure the glass on the flat bed scanner is cleaned regularly too.

As more and more agents get comfortable in sending documents via email and using on line transaction management systems, clean legible copies will be needed.

If you are receiving a bad fax, then just email the link to this blog post to the offending party so they can fix the problem on their end.