IP3000 cross contamination - cause?

[te36]

martin0reg: Liked the hologram info a lot.
kanonvater: good attempt to figure out guidance from few data points. martin0reg didn't bitch about his $85 brand new heads, so i guess they go strong and thats a save bet. If i was buying them i would just be paranoid that they would far survive the printer chassis.

No idea if this works, but if these print heads start failing because of some developing clogging that the nozzle test does not unveil, maybe it can be unveiled with an A4/letter page of full width primary color bars on glossy paper. Those bars require the maximum rate of ink to be pumped though the system, and thats where all my cheap or badly refilled/set-up refill ink cartriges started to show banding. In my experience, glossy was also necessary to keep the resolution and see the banding accurately. On normal paper the ink drops seem to bleed enough to make banding convert into just lighter shades of colors. Maybe the same type of banding might happen with clogging onset in the head and such a page could be used to better judge how well a head performs.

 

[Palatino]

To identify a genuine canon head I have found that the chinese refurbishers, who use to offer their used items as "original and new", copy the packaging almost perfect ... but not the metallic "hologram" sticker. And the heads I bought 2 years ago all have this canon sticker on the outer package

"Almost perfect" . . .

The french translation for Printhead "Tête d'impreeion" is not correct !!
The correct one should be "Tête d'impression".

 

[martin0reg]

That's funny ..so french seems to be really a difficult test for copying...

The sticker is on the outer box, on top.
At least that's where it should be.

But who knows when the sticker will be copied too .. may only depend on the cost..
BTW there may be older models produced before the sticker was introduced by canon, e.g. for the s900/9000.

My rough rule of thumb: epson (cold piezo) heads use to clog, canon (hot bubble jet) heads use to burn.
So refurbished canon heads may still print out some pages, but how many? I think this depends on the "health state" before cleaning, in other words how many nozzles were burnt already.

...I found a German company claiming to have 100 QY6-0042 print heads still in stock. Any comments to this offer @martin0reg ? I think the print heads are true new old stock Canon OEM. It seems the QY6-0064 is a newer replacement type for QY6-0042 so also see this.
...

You are certainly right... advantage of 0064: it fits in the newer IX4000/5000, a3 printers for little money, CMY can print out nice, even without K

 

[te36]

My rough rule of thumb: epson (cold piezo) heads use to clog, canon (hot bubble jet) heads use to burn.
So refurbished canon heads may still print out some pages, but how many? I think this depends on the "health state" before cleaning, in other words how many nozzles were burnt already.

The analysis is certainly reinforced by aliexpress availability of canon heads sold with the note that only black is guaranteed to work.

 

[Smile]

You can always get your money back of the head from aliexpress does not work. And why limit yourself to few pages? print like 50 A4 Photos in a row, if it does not fail, then failure is unlikely.

 

[kanonvater]

Thanks to all the folks who responded! Here's an update. Apologies for the lousy image quality below. My scanner's not working right now, so I did quick and dirty snapshots with a mobile phone.

Here we are 6+ months later. Magenta is no longer much of a problem. I've seen a little of it in the yellow from time to time, but now it's mostly cyan that's the bad actor. Can you believe this nozzle check?



That's kind of a nice shade of green, but it's not supposed to be there! Durned if I can figure out where it's coming from -- both yellow and blue mixing into or replacing the magenta somehow?

Oddly, when I print a block of magenta, it doesn't come out that shade of green, but rather a sort of charcoal greyish color. As I print more pages like that, the magenta gradually works its way toward slightly greyish magenta.



Those are about 4x5 patches of magenta at 600dpi. And you'd be surprised how decent the output is, after I've wasted 2-4 pages printing the above, before doing any real printing. .

The nozzle check below is after such a magenta printing spree. Ignore the partial darkness in the yellow -- it's because one of the big magenta rectangles is on the back of the sheet (sorry).



The printer is currently using cyan faster than any other color. It just about has to be going into the purge system, don't you think?



I have a qy6-0064 printhead on order from inkjetprinthead.com. I hope it's really what they claim it is, new old stock from Canon. It cost more than double what most of the used printheads from China and Hong Kong go for, so if it's not the genuine article, I really overpaid. (In their website photo, the French is misspelled, but I have no way to know whether that's a genuine original Canon spelling error, or a knockoff spelling error.)

Fingers crossed. I'll report back. And thanks again to all.

 

[stratman]

Green = Cyan + Yellow.

Grey may be a mixing of Magenta, Cyan and Yellow.

The second nozzle check looks fairly normal except for missing nozzles for Pigment Black and maybe the Magenta looks darker than expected, possibly due to contamination with Cyan.

Chances are good that a new print head will resolve these issues as long as the ink is of good quality and the cartridges are filled with appropriate ink and functioning properly.

 

[kanonvater]

Thanks. I'm hoping for a resolution with the new printhead.

The pgb is a long standing problem. The missing segments change with every nozzle check. Maybe ink starvation? Changing the black cart (new old stock Canon OEM, not refilled) didn't help, though.

I got a clean pgb nozzle check once after 4 or 5 head cleanings in a row, but it regressed soon after.

A good soaking might fix it, but I prefer to avoid aggressive (out of printer) head cleaning. I have a laser printer for black printing anyway. And if all goes well, the new printhead will take care of that problem too.

I hope the new head (assuming it really is new) lasts a long time, because I doubt that I'll ever find another one for such an aged printer.

 

[PeterBJ]

The purge pad soaked in cyan ink makes me think that the print head might be OK and the cause of the cross contamination is a leaky cyan cartridge.

Are your cartridges new OEM, new aftermarket, refilled OEM, refilled aftermarket or?

 

[kanonvater]

Thanks. I was wondering if the rear purging unit pad was supposed to look like that.

Is the rear pad for the color carts, and the front one for the pgb? Or vice versa? I've seen what looked like spots of color on the front (black) pad from time to time. Confusing.

All the carts are OEM Canon, never (yet) refilled. I've gotten them in various places, not directly from Canon dealers. Thus, I don't know how old they are, if that matters.

I just put a new cyan cart in a few days ago, with no change in the behavior. It did seem like the old one had emptied out pretty quickly, though. How likely is it that two carts in a row would be leaky? Is it possible for the head itself to allow ink to leak through into the purging unit?

The yellow ink seems to be going down pretty fast, too. Guess that figures, since (as the above diagram shows) the green nozzle check bar where magenta should be would come from a mix of cyan and yellow.

I just now swapped out the nearly-empty (reservoir side only) yellow cart for a partly used but much fuller one, so we'll see if that acts differently.