i850 printer problem

[deuxchat]

I've had my i850 for well over a year - the best printer I've ever had, producing the best photo prints ever. This is the first problem I've had with it. I print a lot of color photos on glossy photo 8.5 x 11 paper. Recently, photos are printing with the top portion of the page almost all blue but the bottom portion of the page will be fine with all colors. Sometimes, if I print the same photo again just minutes after getting the blue photo, it will print fine. Besides draining the cyan cartridges rapdily it is wasting lots of paper too.

Here's what I use and what I've done to try correcting the problem:

I use new original BCI-3e Canon cartridges only - no refills. I have always used the glossy photo paper by Kodak which I buy at Costco and it has always given me fantastic results. I have used the cleaning program 3 times which has not helped.

Any ideas?

Sharon

 

[Grandad35]

Sharon,

Welcome to the forum.

If the start of the photo receives extra cyan ink, the problem may be cross-contamination of cyan into other inks caused by a saturated sponge in the head's parked position. The print will also look blue if it is missing yellow ink, so the problem could also be an ink delivery problem from the yellow cart. Both conditions can occur after the printer is idle for a time and both can disappear until the printer is again idle for a while.

Besides draining the cyan cartridges rapdily it is wasting lots of paper too.

Based on this statement, I suspect that cyan ink is leaking into and cross contaminating the other inks.

Print s nozzle check after the printer has been idle for several hours. If the problem is cross-contamination, one or more of the color patches will be the wrong color. If the problem is poor ink delivery, the test patch for that color will be missing or incomplete.

If this doesn't help, can you post a scan of a photo that shows the problem? (See http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=36 for details on posting an image).

 

[deuxchat]

Here is a scan of my nozzle check -- should there be a yellow band?

<img>http://www.nifty-stuff.com/img/files/NozzleCheck1Oct05test.png</img>

Because the colors don't show very well in the scan and it was printed on regular paper, here is a description of the nozzle check:

The bands/rows at the top are black, light blue, purple (light), light green, lighter blue, and lighter purple. the boxes "A" and "F" and "H" are medium gray; the boxes "L" and "M" are a dark teal blue.

I know this can't be right - should yellow be showing more? I think you are absolutely right about the yellow not working correctly. Note that I just had to put in another cyan cartridge, and the yellow cartridge was put in a few days earlier, so both are essentially new; and the magenta is running low.

Should I try putting another yellow cartridge in?

Thanks,
Sharon

 

[deuxchat]

I'm sorry - I was using HTML tags for the scan.... here is another try at posting the scan of the nozzle check:

 

[deuxchat]

Here is a scan of the most recent "blue" printing --- notice the difference in the car at the top to the one directly below it and the faces on the right side photo which are blue!

 

[Grandad35]

Sharon,

Your photos have .jpg tags, but are in .png format. The ".jpg" had to be changed to ".png" to load them into Photoshop.

Here is your blue image split into its C/M/Y/K channels:

You can see that the yellow and black are completely missing from the top of the photo and they slowly begin to show toward the bottom. I can't see any difference in the cyan channel between the two cars, but the top car on the magenta channel is slightly darker than the bottom car. This would seem to indicate that magenta has cross-contaminated the yellow (and maybe black) inks. The nozzle check shows that all of the heads are printing, but (as you said) the yellow is missing. Print another nozzle check immediately after a photo - hopefully you will now see a yellow band. Can someone with an i850 print a nozzle check and report on what colors are printed?

In any case, this indicates that you probably have an ink cross-contamination problem. See:
http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=47
http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=347
http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=399

 

[deuxchat]

Thanks for your reply. I don't know where the "jpg" extension comes from - I only have saved these as .png and I never added a jpg. I did print another photo and right after, did a nozzle check again. This time I got the yellow band!

I followed your instructions to look into the inside of the printer, pulling the power plug with print cartridges in center, then looked at the right side.... since I don't know what the print head looks like I couldn't tell anything from looking in there except that there is a lot of blue on some of the white plastic. Where is the printer head - I see two sponges - one vertical rectangle and beside it a smaller one sitting horizontally. Is this what is to be cleaned? Here is a photo:

 

[deuxchat]

Sorry - didn't realize that the photo didn't load....... photo - inside the i850, right hand side:

 

[Grandad35]

Sharon,

Here is a modified version of your photo highlighting the locations of the two sponges that need to be "sopped up" as well as a bottom view of the printhead (after it has been removed from the printer, of course) showing the locations of the nozzles.

The new nozzle check clearly shows different colors in many areas, indicating a cross-contamination problem.

BTW - if you find a mistake in one of your posts, there is an "edit" option available for this forum (only on your posts) that allows you to change an existing post (just like I am doing now) instead of requiring a separate post as required by many other forums.