Printer Faults - Misfeed in the Multipurpose Tray

Multipurpose trays are usually a drop-down assembly on the front of a laser printer. They are used for a wide range of media including letterhead, envelopes and transparencies. Not every printer has such a tray. Most HP designs do, Lexmark usually reserve it for the certian models but might provide a "bypass" slot on others. A bypass slot pushes a single envelope or letterhead into the normal paper path.

A true multipurpose tray has its own pickup roller and pad. On HP laserJets it is "tray 1" but other manufacturers can leave it out of the tray number scheme.

Multipurpose trays are generally used a bit less than the main tray but Letterhead is often on heavier paper and envelopes involve a double layer of paper

One role of the MP tray is that there can be a relatively straight path from the front of the printer to a face-up output tray that can be lowered on the rear of the printer. This can take materials like card so media quality issues could be more likely.

The multipurpose tray does have the advantage that what the media does is visible although the action at the roller may be too swift to observe it closely.

Unless the multipurpose tray is never used it is normal to change the roller and pad at the same time as other rollers as part of a general cleaning. Rollers and pads often come as part of a maintenance kit.

The multipurpose tray may have its own paper feed flag but that is often to detect whether any media is present - if not the printer will prompt "load media in tray 1" or suchlike message. Actual detection of paper feed is likely to be from the same flag just before the registration station used for the cassette.