Electrical failure? Pro 9000 Mark II

[jtoolman]

I am wondering what the service life is on a 9000 MKII?
You said you were printing a 250 page order. What sort of material are you printing on what is supposed to be a photo printer.
My one 9000 MKII ( I have two more new in box ) gets about 10 prints a month when even I need to print on full glossy papers as it is simply the best printer out of the other 14 which are all pigment for when I have to print on Glossy Media.
I would never consider using this printer as a high volume printer such as what you are putting it through.

During your use, did you ever let the printer continue to print even after getting a low ink warning till you began to see a deterioration of image quality?

Just some thoughts as to why the print head has becomed fried in just 6 months use.

Joe

 

[Nirvash]

This isn't normal use for the printer, I usually print a lot less with it. And whenever possible I wouldn't let the carts run out of ink, but even then Yellow usually isn't an issue, PM and PC tend to run low sooner.

 

[Grandad35]

I do have the set of OEM carts from the spare's box and will be using those if I send it in.

It would be suspicious to return the printer with completely full OEM carts, so you might want to use them for a while to get the levels down.

 

[The Hat]

This isn't normal use for the printer, I usually print a lot less with it. And whenever possible I wouldn't let the carts run out of ink, but even then Yellow usually isn't an issue, PM and PC tend to run low sooner.

Jose is right it is unwise to continue to print after the low ink notice is given and most certainly not after the out of ink warning,
its only a matter of time before the heads go, that is a certainty..

 

[mikling]

I recall a discussion once about the duty cycle of a printhead. It is my feeling that this is of significance for the Pro9000. Here is why. Heat plays a large part in the life of electronics especially small circuits like those on a Canon printhead. A continuous large run of full bleed images on a Pro9000 will subject the printhead to possibly the heaviest load you can ask of it with hardly any time for cooling. If there are any weak circuits or parts, they will likely fail first.
Now couple this with the use of PhotoMagenta and PhotoCyan which are actually much lighter colors than Magenta and Cyan, and with the aspect of the use of fixed relatively small size droplets and you'll then realize that the printhead is possibly continually firing much of the time.
With the Pro-100 the 9000 replacement, we'll see if Canon elected to modify their screening patterns for each dot.

On the Epson 1400/1430 series, the photocyan and photomagenta is used very heavily as well. On the artisan AIO printers, the same inks are used but Epson appears to have backed off on the very heavy use of the photocolors during printing giving a more even use of all the colors.

Now don't forget that a sample of one is not definitive of what other printers will be like. There is also the aspect that it might simply been a weak circuit.

I am going through the same situation in another way. I am looking for a good used car. When reading reviews and possible weak points of cars, you'd think that they are all just falling apart and failing but I don't think so. Some more than others might exhibit problems but you can get the impression that all cars are lemons when you read of the reported problems.
Even the better ones have bad transmissions etc. Stuff happens I guess.

 

[The Hat]

I will agree with that because I havent had any lemons either with any of my printers
and as far as I know the 9000 shares the same print head as the i9950.

I used to leave my i9950 running overnight 6 to 8 hours at a time when it had a CISS on it,
doing 320 x 450 mm solid sheets and it never once had a problem with over-heating.

It used to take regular rest periods while working and I reckon with volume printing,
the slower the better works the best, it could take 18 minutes just too complete one sheet.

I have only had one print head failure so far on a A4 printer,
it was printing three text sheets with little colour at the time, when I got the message change print head.

Look on the bright side, isnt it a good thing that printers dont have transmissions..

 

[Nirvash]

Bit of an update. After talking to Canon support, a new print head is in the mail, so props to them and their fast support!
And on the topic of overheating, I do usually run the printer with max dry time between pages, so hopefully that helps a bit.

 

[Nirvash]

With closer inspection, everything is not well in spare printer land.

Today I noticed some odd banding in a print, it looked like magenta was giving some faint banding in the first 1/4 inch to inch of the print, so I ran a nozzle check but it looked good.
i.imgur.com/ToQdpgz.jpg

I was however able to reproduce the banding on a test patch (Notice the faint banding in the magenta).
i.imgur.com/h9U4Za7.jpg

I went through the normal steps to troubleshoot, changed carts, new OEM cart, cleaning, nothing worked. So I threw the printer into service mode and ran a deep clean, then right after that a test page.

i.imgur.com/crcRLHT.jpg

Which looked great, then I waited 3 minutes and ran another test page. This time the magenta didn't look so great. I ran this test a couple of times and got the same results, good after a clean, but got worse as the printer sat there.

i.imgur.com/5ZWtEjy.jpg


It looks to me that magenta isn't staying pure magenta, which doesn't mean good things for this printer/head. What do you think?

 

[The Hat]

I had the four JPEGS on screen at the same time and to be honest from what I could see of your magenta,
it looked to have the least of the problems.

Now did you start with new OEM cartridges or use refilled ones, did you remember to do a head alignment before any of your test prints,
all of these thing can have a huge bearing on your output.

To have a faulty print head in your first printer is most unfortunate but to have two ?
There has to be something else causing your poor ink flow problem.

 

[Nirvash]

I agree that my post last night was a little premature, mostly due to frustration. I am redoing the tests today, with OEM carts and my refill ones to attempt to find the root cause. I am unsure why the second test print did so much worse with BK and Yellow, though I missed those because I was mainly looking at magenta, which I still find the purple banding in odd. Hopefully through troubleshooting to I figure that out