Canon nozzle test pattern - help in interpreting

[ghwellsjr]

Wow, Trigger 37, I'm amazed at your knowledge. Are you retired from Canon or some other printer manufacturer?

 

[dan_uk_1984]

Trigger, I thought if you used the BC-20, the optional printhead unit would take the BCi-21's? These have a different moulding on the cartridge so that you cant use BCi-24's......

One problem I found when the new i series came out, i350,i455,mp360 etc etc was that non oem carts caused a lot of problems on the new printers. The new printers had a finer print head and I think some manufacturers hadn'y adjusted their ink formula to suit.

I sold hundreds of the new range of Canon Printers to people with Lexmarks, a Lexmark #16 was 25.00 where as a Canon BCi-24 was 5.00 with only slightly less ink (9ml vs 14ml I think).

 

[martin]

Hello Triiger,

I should really have stated how I came to the conclusion. I tried shaking and then wicking the excess ink out of the cartridge but saw - using a magnifying glass - that the outlet pad was still wet/saturated. And the nozzle tests were still problematic. I tried another cartridge which was similarly filled to the point that the outlet pad looked wet, and the nozzle test patterns were similarly faulty. So I took one of my empty cartridges (refilled with clean absorbent sponge) and put just 3ml into each compartment and waited until the outlet pad showed the ink had spread throughout. In fact, just looking at the pad made me think there probably wasn't enough ink, but a dab of a paper towel proved there was plenty of ink there. The nozzle test pattern was perfect and a couple of pictures printed out onto A4 were perfect.

Interesting to read your helpful remarks on cartridge construction. What you say makes a olt of sense; I had noticed that dried ink, and time, seemed to render the cartridge useless after a couple of refills - hence my experimenting with a different absorbent material.

Given such problems, I'm not surprised things have moved on with cartridge construction. I'd seen some of the refilling inkjet posts over the last couple of years and wished my printer had the more modern cartridges.

Many thanks for the explanations and helpful advice - it's much appreciated.

Martin