Issues with refilling my PIXMA MX492 cartridges (PG-245)

[Jeremie]

Hi

I refilled my cartridge today and my black prints are not as rich as before. The blacks are grayish. Bold text almost ressembles normal text.

I used my original ink until it said it was low. If I recall correctly, it was already printing grayish pages at that time since the ink was low. When I got the ink, I refilled it with about 7ML of ink and my prints are still gray.

I did deep cleaning and normal cleaning of print head serveral times thhrough porinter driver, soaked the print head in warm water for about 2 hours, refilled the ink again thiking maybe it was to low.

Now I don't know, I have a feeling the printer thinks ink is low so it doesn't use as much. But I got the error message saying check ink and bypassed it with the stop button and now no more estimates in print driver so I wouldn't see why the printer would limit ink.

Really have no idea now...

Thanks for the help!

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Could you please run a regular cleaning cycle , then print the nozzle check and post it here. The question is whether there is some regular drop out pattern visible

 

[Jeremie]

Could you please run a regular cleaning cycle , then print the nozzle check and post it here. The question is whether there is some regular drop out pattern visible

Here it is.

http://i.imgur.com/HvUcztE.jpg

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

This nozzle check looks pretty good, no gaps and irregularities, and it somehow won't match with the printout and image above - do you still have those stripes when printing a small(er) black square ?

 

[Jeremie]

This nozzle check looks pretty good, no gaps and irregularities, and it somehow won't match with the printout and image above - do you still have those stripes when printing a small(er) black square ?

Can't try it out right now will tomorrow.

But I did do a cpy of an old timesheet earlier today I had and now it's also less black and more grayish. I can post the 2 pages tomorrow.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

the horizontal stripes in your picture above are irritating, and such a pattern is not supported by the last nozzle check. But please be aware that the black level of an ink by different cartridge and refill ink suppliers can vary - it can vary from dark gray to a good black, but that would not explain the horizontal stripes.

 

[Jeremie]

the horizontal stripes in your picture above are irritating, and such a pattern is not supported by the last nozzle check. But please be aware that the black level of an ink by different cartridge and refill ink suppliers can vary - it can vary from dark gray to a good black, but that would not explain the horizontal stripes.

Can't find the timesheets for comparaison but here are some prints. The last page is printer from http://printatestpage.com/ for the black test.

Prints results

In real life, I can see three distinct lines in the square, and 3 sections are different tones of black.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I'm not familiar with this type of cartridge with an integrated printhead, the black area you refer to is very different to the starting image, the thin lines are most likely a sign of banding, quite a typical effect with Canon printers when printing solid black fields with normal paper settings. You may have an option for printhead alignment in the driver - I don't know, you may increase the print quality in the driver to reduce that effect. And different shades of black may be an indication that the refill ink is not as dense as the genuine Canon ink. There is an option here to upload picture files directly into this thread with the 'Upload a file' option.

 

[Jeremie]

I'm not familiar with this type of cartridge with an integrated printhead, the black area you refer to is very different to the starting image, the thin lines are most likely a sign of banding, quite a typical effect with Canon printers when printing solid black fields with normal paper settings. You may have an option for printhead alignment in the driver - I don't know, you may increase the print quality in the driver to reduce that effect. And different shades of black may be an indication that the refill ink is not as dense as the genuine Canon ink. There is an option here to upload picture files directly into this thread with the 'Upload a file' option.

Tried with higher quality same effect.

But yeah, I think it's the ink itself... I ordered some new different ink and il clean out the cartridge and put that one when I get to see if it's different.

I know, but the images are to big and putting them into the thread would be quite large.

 

[PeterBJ]

...But yeah, I think it's the ink itself... I ordered some new different ink and il clean out the cartridge and put that one when I get to see if it's different...

So do I. I have had similar problems with the black combi cartridges, both Canon and HP. A pigment black refill ink that works perfectly in a single ink tank cartridges like PGI-5, PGI-x20, PGI-x25 and PGI-x50 seems not to work well in the combined sponge/printhead black cartridges. Refill inks for the dye ink cartridges CLI-8, CLI-x21 and CLI-x26 work well in the tri-colour combi cartridges.

A dye BK refill ink can be used in the black combi cartridges. It is not perfect, but has fewer flow problems.

Here is an example of the same KMP-U pigment black used in a combined sponge/printhead cartridge and a single ink tank cartridge:

Please report your results with the other inks. Other people refilling the combined cartridges might have the same problems.