Canon Pro9000 ll colour shift noticeable in greys

[Emulator]

With regard to the B&W prints it rather depends on how you printed them.

As Rodbam said if you use EasyPrint Pro "Greyscale Photo" the printer uses a special Canon routine. To me it appears to use the black cartridge, although you can still adjust the "cold/Warm" slider under colour management with some effect, so may be it does make use of some colour input.

I find that printing B/W without using greyscale photo, without any adjustment, results in a very warm, even brownish print.

As far as the other colour shift problems are concerned, I would reverse the cartridge swapping process and see what happens. Printing on plain paper is cheap enough and will show the effects. You should be able to draw conclusions from the results.

The problem will be the time it takes for the ink to work through the print head.

I think it is more likely to be lack of cyan, rather than an excess of magenta. So I would put the Octo magenta in first and use it for a while.

Good luck

 

[Grandad35]

DSchell:

You can't use photos that you took at a birthday party and (perhaps) adjusted on an uncalibrated monitor to judge a printer's color accuracy.

Did you use a gray card to set a "custom white balance" on your camera when you took the photos? Even if you did, was the lighting uniform so that the walls had exactly the same lighting as where you shot the gray card? If you used a flash (probable), the illumination on the walls would almost certainly be different than the subjects which were closer and received much more light from the flash.

Colors displayed on an uncalibrated monitor are irrelevant.

Mixing inks from different sources is going down the wrong road - you may improve one specific area of the color gamut, buy what are the effects in other areas? Printer profiles address these issues.

Download one of the "Standard color images" and use it to judge your printer's color if you are only worried about the printer's color and unconcerned about the effects of your camera or monitor on your prints.

Color management isn't free and takes a while to learn, but if you are worried about your printed colors the rewards are great.

 

[Emulator]

I had already tested a new OEM Cyan ink cartridge versus an Octo Ink refilled OEM cartridge and found no noticeable difference. But I had not tested the Photo Cyan.

I have since purchased a new OEM PhotoCyan cartridge to enable further testing of this problem.

By creating a rectangle of grey with each RGB value set to 210 in PhotoShop Elements and printing this to fill A5 sheets of plain paper, I find that five or six sheets are sufficient to bring through changes of ink to the print head.

I have found quite a noticeable difference in the 210 grey between the two Photo Cyan cartridges.

It must be said that printing greys will show effects that may not be noticeable when printing colours, but none the less, greys are present in many images and must be faithfully reproduced.

The profile I used was specifically created to match the Octo inks and thus the OEM ink "grey" in this test has reproduced well towards cyan. A new profile would correct this.

I have now tested two refilled OEM cartridges with the same results. The original colour shift in greys at the start of the grey block, has also returned to haunt me, but is not visible with the new OEM ink cartridge. I shall have to create a new profile specifically to test for this.

So Dave your walls may not be at fault!! Try out a new OEM PhotoCyan ink cartridge and let me know the result.

Regards Ian

P.S.
I have subsequently purged one of the two Octoink filled PhotoCyan carts and re-filled from a new squeasy bottle of Octoink with a different batch number. This is producing results almost identical to the OEM PhotoCyan. So now I am about to produce a new profile.

Hopefully problem solved. I think Peter your hunch was right.

P.P.S
Having built the new profile, using all Octo inks, with the new bottle of Lt Cyan, the results are pleasingly different.

Gone are the straw coloured greys, without any manual adjustments to the profile sliders.

The colour shift in the first 1/2 inch of the light greys has disappeared.

I'll now see how it goes and watch for any changes with time.

On the subject of profiling, there is a web review of the SpyderPrint spectrocolorimeter which highlights the need to keep the white tile clean and the spectro head free from resin particles, which are rubbed from the print surface during strip reading. This particularly applies to resins which have UV whitener additives. The use of the thin plastic film I advocated in earlier posts also has the beneficial affect of preventing these particles being generated and entering the spectro head and is a great aid to smooth and quicker patch reading.

With regard to the whitening agent issue, if you are using Spyder Print software, you can enter "Advanced Editing" on the "SpyderProof - View" page and click "White", tick the box and OK. You can also tick the black box. This will reset the white and black points, compensating for any blue UV effect in the printer test charts.

 

[DSchell]

It is disturbing to read that OctoInk produces quite different results from Canon ink.

But there are things that disturb me even more, and one of those is finding that I've made a terrible error.

For a several days now, when I print a page, my printer has told me that cartridges are nearly empty.
Today I got around to refilling them.
First was Green; no problem.
Second was Photo Magenta; when I pulled the cartridge from the printer, and prepared to refill it, there was no silicon stopper in the refill hole!
Where did it go? How did it disappear? How long has this been the situation?
A situation like this could easily have caused the excess magenta that I complained about; I just have trouble believing that in changing cartridges between OEM and refillable, that I would not have noticed a missing stopper.

Puzzling and embarrassing!

I found a rubber stopper used in a different manufacturer's refill kit, and plugged the hole with that. It doesn't drip, so I'm thinking it is satisfactory.

Dave S.

 

[Emulator]

Hi Dave

I see you have surfaced again.

That is a new and interesting slant on the problem. Without the plug I would have expected the cartridge would have drained away through the print head. Have you looked for a pool of ink below the print head.

The second question is, has it cured your problem, how is the printer printing?

On the question of OctoInks, I find that they perform in a very similar way to OEM inks. My problem has been with a particular bottle/batch of Lt Cyan. The new bottle performs well.

 

[websnail]

It is disturbing to read that OctoInk produces quite different results from Canon ink.

I have had some reports of this but literally only one or two while the bulk of them have been that the colours were very close to OEM.

That said I wasn't aware of a particular batch issue with the Light Cyan (as reported above) so that might explain the issues highlighted. Unfortunately that nugget didn't make it back to me so I've been "blissfully"(?!) unaware until now.

Second was Photo Magenta; when I pulled the cartridge from the printer, and prepared to refill it, there was no silicon stopper in the refill hole!
Where did it go? How did it disappear? How long has this been the situation?
A situation like this could easily have caused the excess magenta that I complained about; I just have trouble believing that in changing cartridges between OEM and refillable, that I would not have noticed a missing stopper.

Can't even begin to theorise what exactly happened but a solution to avoid a repeat is to use a little electricians (or aluminium) tape stretched over the stopper to ensure the plug doesn't ping out.

I found a rubber stopper used in a different manufacturer's refill kit, and plugged the hole with that. It doesn't drip, so I'm thinking it is satisfactory.

If it's not dripping then chances are it's ok but I'd check ink levels a few times manually just to be sure it's not leaking.

 

[websnail]

On the question of OctoInks, I find that they perform in a very similar way to OEM inks. My problem has been with a particular bottle/batch of Lt Cyan. The new bottle performs well.

Glad you found a solution although I'm strangely comforted that it was a batch issue...

Could I ask you to drop me a PM or email with the batch references (if you have them) for the problem and good/current ink supply you have of the Light Cyan. Would be useful to cross reference against other reports.

 

[The Hat]

Just a footnote to the above that I would like to add also.

I found that when colours change slightly especially in the eight and ten cartridge printers
in can be down to incorrectly filling a cartridge with the wrong colour ink.

Some say O' I'd never do that, but it can easily and unknowingly happen with the light Cyan, Magenta, and Grey coloured inks.

There are 3 possible ways to prevent this happening the once or ever again (not eliminate it).

One is to have a dedicated layout area for your refilling procedure with all of your bottles cartridges, syringes and resetter separate, not in front of your screen, over your printer or keyboard.

Two is to insure that ALL of the bottles are clearly and distinctively labelled (brightly)
including each shade of colour with large printed Wording and keep distractions to a minimum.

Three is the easiest of them all, its better to have a spare set of cartridges ready rather than to run the risk of rushing a refill to get that last few prints done and end up killing your best friends into the bargain Time and Patience

Then next day when that slight and gradual colour change that has somehow magically appeared causes you to pull out your remaining hair, run every imaginable head clean there is then print off another 20 pages to see if that will somehow clear the problem.

As I said earlier there is no substitute for Time and Patience so dont forget them they are after all completely free and will save you an awful lot in the long run, otherwise your printed forest may well turn out to be slightly blue..ish.

My two cent worth..

 

[ThrillaMozilla]

...there was no silicon stopper in the refill hole!

But surely there was a silicone stopper--right?
silicon silicon silicon inside silicone silicone inside

 

[DSchell]

...there was no silicon stopper in the refill hole!

But surely there was a silicone stopper--right?

I'm not sure what you're asking.

Yes, there originally was a silicon stopper for each cartridge, and yes, to the best of my recollection, the stopper has been used to fill each hole after every refill.
If not, the ink would have poured out of the cartridge.

So can they pop out while in the printer?
If so, where would they go?
I've searched the insides of the printer, and haven't found a loose stopper.

Dave S.