Canon Pixma is printing yellow as orange

[William]

I have a Canon Pixma G3100 printer that is printing the yellow color as orange. The nozzle check pattern looks OK except for the Yellow box that looks orange.

Recently, this printer ran out of magenta ink, and I replaced it with generic magenta ink. The other color tanks (including yellow) are half, and still contains the original ink.

I also tried to print a big yellow box (created in Word) and the whole box was orange.

Even when the yellow ink is the original one, just to verify the color I carefully take a little amount from the tank, and it is yellow as expected.

Any idea on why it is happening and how to solve this problem?

 

[stratman]

Welcome to the forum, William.

Orange is made by mixing Yellow and Red. Sounds like mixing of the Yellow and Magenta to give Orange.

The nozzle check is only supposed to be the pure ink color in the cartridge and not a mixture.

Maybe something was disrupted when you refilled.

Look for leaked Magenta in the printer, print head, ink lines/tubing, outside the cartridges, the tubing and tanks are securely fit, the print head is secured, etc.

Please print a nozzle check, scan, crop and post here so we can examine it.

 

[The Hat]

Recently, this printer ran out of magenta ink, and I replaced it with generic magenta ink

As this has only come to light since you’ve run out of magenta, there a possibility that you have damaged the connections where all the tubing come together at the print head, carefully check that the tubing are all in place.

How long were your printing before you noticed your magenta tank was empty, and did you interfere with the tubing getting the air out of the magenta line and disturbed the yellow tubing.. ? If you have done something else then please say so..

 

[William]

Welcome to the forum, William.

Orange is made by mixing Yellow and Red. Sounds like mixing of the Yellow and Magenta to give Orange.

The nozzle check is only supposed to be the pure ink color in the cartridge and not a mixture.

Maybe something was disrupted when you refilled.

Look for leaked Magenta in the printer, print head, ink lines/tubing, outside the cartridges, the tubing and tanks are securely fit, the print head is secured, etc.

Please print a nozzle check, scan, crop and post here so we can examine it.

Hi stratman,
I attached the nozzle check pattern, at the right of the "yellow" (actually orange) I dropped some yellow ink taken from the tank so you can compare how the actual ink looks like (this is the original yellow ink).

I could not find any visible ink leakage.

My guess is that somehow the printer can detect that I placed not-original ink, and it is intentionally printing wrong. Is that possible?

 

[William]

Hi "The Hat",

As this has only come to light since you’ve run out of magenta, there a possibility that you have damaged the connections where all the tubing come together at the print head, carefully check that the tubing are all in place.

It is unlikely that I damaged connections or printing heads, as this is an ink tank printer (not cartridge to change). I just opened the magenta tank an refilled it (other tanks were not touched). The yellow tank still contains original ink, an it is a little below the half.

How long were your printing before you noticed your magenta tank was empty, and did you interfere with the tubing getting the air out of the magenta line and disturbed the yellow tubing.. ? If you have done something else then please say so..

The magenta ink never was completely empty, I refilled it before reaching the lower tank line.
Before refilling, I had some problems with one color (I believe it was blue, but not completely sure) so I did a head cleaning, I doesn't work so I did a deep head clean. The deep cleaning was visibly consuming too much ink (I could see the color ink levels going down) so I aborted it, it seemed to solve the color problem. After that I refilled the orange tank, two weeks later I detected the yellow issue.

 

[stratman]

My guess is that somehow the printer can detect that I placed not-original ink, and it is intentionally printing wrong. Is that possible?

No.

I dropped some yellow ink taken from the tank so you can compare how the actual ink looks like (this is the original yellow ink).

Look at the color of Yellow in the nozzle check instructions from your Service Manual. Does your ink smear look the same color?

https://ij.manual.canon/ij/webmanual/Manual/All/G3000 series/EN/BG/bg-maintenance1300.html

Your smear of Yellow ink from the tank is Orange. You have contaminated Yellow ink. Magenta is leaking downstream from the Yellow tank and backing up into the Yellow Tank.

OR... you refilled the Yellow tank with wrong ink or the OEM ink and aftermarket ink reacted and produced Orange.

This is a reason why we ask people to post entire nozzle checks. A picture can be worth a thousand words that the forum member may not realize.

Where the contamination originates is what you need to find and correct. Unless you refilled with the wrong or bad ink. Then you need to replace it along with flushing out the bad ink from the system.

Refer back to my original post on this. The Hat duplicated this and added a little more info, so take all into account.

 

[William]

No.

Yeah I also though that should be technically very hard to detect.

Look at the color of Yellow in the nozzle check instructions from your Service Manual. Does your ink smear look the same color?

https://ij.manual.canon/ij/webmanual/Manual/All/G3000 series/EN/BG/bg-maintenance1300.html

Your smear of Yellow ink from the tank is Orange. You have contaminated Yellow ink. Magenta is leaking downstream from the Yellow tank and backing up into the Yellow Tank.

OR... you refilled the Yellow tank with wrong ink or the OEM ink and aftermarket ink reacted and produced Orange.

This is a reason why we ask people to post entire nozzle checks. A picture can be worth a thousand words that the forum member may not realize.

The image I uploaded (see attachment in post #4) is from the Nozzle Check Pattern, I just dropped some yellow ink from the tank after printing it. The ink from the tank looks normal yellow, but your guess of leaking from magenta to yellow makes sense to me, probably it is not enough to reach the tank (in a short time) but to contaminate the duct.

Where the contamination originates is what you need to find and correct. Unless you refilled with the wrong or bad ink. Then you need to replace it along with flushing out the bad ink from the system.

Refer back to my original post on this. The Hat duplicated this and added a little more info, so take all into account.

I'm pretty sure now that the magenta ink is leaking to the yellow pipe, in fact it make a lot of sense that I noticed the problem now as and not before, because after refilling the magenta tank the ink level on it is higher than in the yellow one, so gravity is pushing ink from M->Y.
After doing several printings today, the yellow pattern looks much better, indicating that I consumed the contaminated ink.
The obvious workaround to this problem is to keep the yellow and magenta tank the same level, but if you have a better solution please let me know. (I did not want to refill other colors to avoid mixing different kind of inks).

Thanks!
William

 

[PeterBJ]

It looks to me like all three colours are contaminated. Cyan has turned a dull greyish blue, magenta is also dull, especially the light magenta, and yellow has turned a dull orange.

The colour printhead is a modified combined sponge and printhead tri-colour cartridge, meaning that the three colours cyan, magenta and yellow share the same printhead and section of the purge unit. If some ink leaked onto the purge pad for the colour it could wick up into the nozzles for the other colours, causing the cross contamination.

If you are lucky cleaning the colour printhead a few times will clear the wrong ink from the nozzles.

 

[palombian]

The same issue has been posted on dpreview.

This looks indeed as contamination, I observed it when refilling Maxify cartridges - in particular the refillables, much less OEM - and it is caused by pressure differences.
On this printer the trick is to print a number of pages to equalize the pressure, and in case of contamination print plain pages of the infected color until cleared.
I don't know how the pressure problem could arise in the G3100, maybe the OEM bottles are needed for a correct refill ?

 

[PeterBJ]

Print purge pages might be the perfect tool to clear the wrong colours from the nozzles. That's the purpose of purge pages. I have attached a zip folder with CMYK purge pages.

Don't use purge pages to try to unblock clogged nozzles as a reliable flow of ink is needed to cool the nozzle heaters, else they risk burning out and ruining the printhead.