Green cast on photo prints

[Vorkolor]

Recently (last month or two) my photo prints have had a green cast. I'm using refillable cartridges (CLI-551, refilled OEM not an option). I don't recall the cast being there in the spring, but I don't recall when I switched from compatible cartridges to refillables and installed this magenta cartridge, either. There's no obvious sign of ink starvation or banding in the prints, and nozzle checks look fine. Is it possible that the magenta cartridge is supplying too little ink but still enough that printing works (i.e. drops are too small or the printhead is firing blanks say every fifth time)? OR opposite, too much cyan and yellow getting on the paper?

 

[Vorkolor]

I should add I've been driving this printer hard, over 2000 pages (mostly text/illustrations on plain paper) in ten months.

 

[The Hat]

Sometimes the ink supplier can change one of the colours in their colour range and you don’t notice it for 3 or 4 refills, but by then your left scratching your head as to what could have caused it.

Try the test sheet below and print just two A4 sheets out and that will tell you quickly if one or more of your cartridges are not delivering sufficient enough ink all of the time..

 

[William Seaward]

Try the test sheet below and print just two A4 sheets out and that will tell you quickly if one or more of your cartridges are not delivering sufficient enough ink all of the time..

Do you have a full size version of this image? I'm only getting a very small image when I download.

 

[The Hat]

Ops....

 

[Vorkolor]

Large blocks of color looks fine (except some shade banding in pigment black, but no missing lines). Nozzle check looks fine. Switched to my other set of cartridges, but no difference. Setting the Windows driver to Magenta +30, Cyan -30 makes photo prints look OK white-balance-wise. Oh well. If it doesn't get worse I can live with it for now. If it does get worse I'll try to find a used printer with the same cartridge type, and see if the same happens on that.

 

[PeterBJ]

If the colour cast first appeared when you switched from the compatible single use cartridges to refillable cartridges, I think the printer/printhead is OK. In stead I suspect the refill ink. So which refill inks do you use?

The correction in the driver looks like twice as much as I used here, so this makes me think that your magenta could be photo magenta delivered by a mistake. Replacing regular magenta with photo magenta would give a strong green cast.

 

[Vorkolor]

I use the inkset from Octoinkjet.

 

[The Hat]

@Vorkolor, you say that the colour blocks looked fine in the test print, but how could they if you have a green cast in your prints, the Y, MY and M would be different.

Reprint the test sheet again but print two sheets this time and if your suffering from ink starvation it will show up on the second sheet, the output colours should look the same as what you see on your screen, with no green cast...

 

[Vorkolor]

They looked fine as in no sign of blocked nozzles or ink starvation. I didn't do any color accuracy inspection of the test sheet.