Canon Pixma Pro-1 - Head Problem / Nozzle Check / Workaround

[granedus]

Below you can see Nozzle Check print from Canon Pixma Pro-1. The print head or printer circuit board is having electronic issue in DGY and GY channels. There is clearly visible tone difference between two parts (upper and lower) of a rectangle of a broken color channel.

I am curious
- what are these rectangles?
- why each color rectangle has upper and lower part?

If I understand right, for every color channel there are groups of nozzle jets. Not sure if there are different size of nozzles for different size of ink drops. But, there is however, two groups of nozzles (for each color) for movement of print head to the left and to the right. This is certainly to be related with printer printing speed. As explained below by Artur5 there are actually 4 groups, 2 for upper part of rectangle, 2 for lower part. This particular printer has printer head with one group out of 4 to be completely non functional in two colors.

Now, not all of my prints look good. There are certainly stripes of missing GY and DGY colors.
The defect looks like this:

Interestingly, with this particular printer, I am able to work with print settings and have a perfect print. What I need to do is to enforce highest quality and also prioritize quality over speed. I believe in this case printer will not rush, so printing speed is not important, so second group "<- right" of color channel nozzles is not being used. This operation mode also has no dependency to head alignment, because entire picture is printed with only one directional group of nozzles per channel.

Settings in Easy-PhotoPrint EX

Still, I have to discover how-to achieve similar results when printing from any other application.

 

[Artur5]

Those rectangles on nozzle checks are printed unidirectionally, no left to right vs right to left or print speed question.

What you see in these 2 faulty bands is a typical example of electronic failure of the printhead. Some chip controlling the output of part of the nozzles on a particular color is fried. If the lower part of the rectangle is lighter, it means that half of the nozzles on that area aren’t firing, while in the upper part all nozzles work correctly.
Sometimes it happens this way and sometimes the bottom or top half are totally blank, meaning that none of the nozzles in that area are firing.
In your case, GY and DGY have 25% of missing nozzles. Therefore, depending on the image, prints will be almost OK or exhibit visible banding. Also, using higher quality modes the printer makes more passes per row and the missing nozzles are ‘disguised’ by the good ones in subsequent passes of the printhead.

 

[granedus]

Also, using higher quality modes the printer makes more passes per row and the missing nozzles are ‘disguised’ by the good ones in subsequent passes of the printhead.

Is there a way to enforce this mode of operation when printing from Photoshop or other applications (other then Easy-PhotoPrint EX)?

 

[Artur5]

Open the driver settings of the printer and, in the main tab, choose 'High' as printing quality ( or select customized and set it to '1').

 

[granedus]

Open the driver settings of the printer and, in the main tab, choose 'High' as printing quality ( or select customized and set it to '1').

Surprisingly, this setting is not producing same result as output from Easy-PhotoPrint EX.
The print output having stripes, so it seems problematic nozzles are counted in and obviously not firing.

The option "Print with the best quality when you select [Quality Priority]" is not there.

 

[granedus]

Afterall, there is no way to disable missing nozzle group from being used during printing. Everything depends on the given image that is being printed. I gave up and return the printer being faulty with nozzle groups missing in two colors.

I would attempt to replace printing head if I get this printer for close to free, but big chances there is need to replace mainboard as well and set of inks is required for printing head swap (due to big waste related to printing head swap).