One day my Phaser 3010 started ghosting and printing smudges. I scoured to googlenet for an answer but all i could come up with is claims that it's either the drum or the roller or some form of physical wear fault on one of the printing components.
I was finding it hard to come to terms with this. The ghosting and the smudges started almost over night. I thought that something must have somehow ruined the integrity of the roller, somehow made it "dirty". So, i decided to try printing out a couple of black pages hoping the heat and excess ink would detach the "dirt", whatever the "dirt" may be. But it didn't help.
So i did this - took a flower pot mister and sprayed a single page of paper from a distance. Then i printed out 10 full black pages.
Then i sprayed a single page of paper from a distance and printed out 20 blank / white pages. It worked, there are no more smudges or ghosting.
The roller somehow got ditry in a manner that kept sticking printing powder to it. The heat of the first 10 black pages run starting with a moist page likely dissolved the "dirt". The following 20 blank pages starting with a moist page removed it. It really did. You could see the first few pages still having faint black smudges and then the next 12 being perfectly blank. And there you have it - that's how i fixed the ghosting and smudges issue on my Phaser 3010.
I'm sure this seems and likely is a very ill advised, poorly thought out and uneducated method. But it worked for me. If you are going to follow it you take on full reponsibility for the possible negative effects. My printer was out of warrenty and a very low-end model so i had little to lose.
If you are going to do it I have one tip which is that you should not get the paper overly wet, for obvious electronics and moisture reasons but also because an overly moist paper might make a mess on the roller that escalates the problem of a "dirty" roller instead of fixing it.
