Little striping problem with Canon Pixma MP760

[vilrockerdefer]

I tried manual alignment. It helped. Now the condition of the top quality printing of nebulae on photo paper is just inbetween what it was when I wrote post #1 and what it was before I tried manual alignment.

I encountered a problem when doing manual alignment : some gray boxes I had to choose from in the column all had branding. Same for some blues and somes pinks but less.

Solid yellow is perfect no matter photo or plain paper. Here is what the test looks like on plain paper :

 

[The Hat]

vilrockerdefer..

I always do manual alignment if I have being fiddling with the printhead on my canons. I get banding on some of the boxes as well and the idea is to pick the one that appears the best, I use an eyeball when checking mine..

 

[vilrockerdefer]

Well, that's what I did as well but unfortunately the branding is still too important to give prints an acceptable look.

 

[ghwellsjr]

You said in post #42 that the most striping was on yellow and now you're saying that yellow is perfect. In post #42 you said there was no striping on blue and the only striping that I can see in your most recent image is in the blue. What I'm trying to do is get a simple image that has the striping problem so that we can work on it. Is there any such image that you have found?

If you think the striping is related to alignment then I would suggest that you do a manual alignment setting everything to one extreme and see what that does to the striping. Then repeat with the settings all at zero and repeat with the settings at the other extreme.

 

[ghwellsjr]

Tin Ho may be right about the cause of your problem, at least I discovered that manual alignment is better than auto alignment on my MP760.

Actually, when I manually set all the values to their positive extreme, it wasn't so bad, but alternating between positive and negative values created the worst problem.

When I did an auto alignment, the values I got were mostly different by one from those that I determined manually were the best and one value was different by two.

The problem that misalignment causes is what I would call a graininess to the image. This may not be the problem that you originally reported but it is definately better to do a manual alignment than an auto alignment. Thanks, Tin Ho, for the suggestion.

 

[vilrockerdefer]

In fact, as I hoped man should be able to see in post #61, there is no striping in blue (there is only a black mark that is not my actual problem), and there is indeed striping in yellow but only when it is darkened, and absolutely not on plain yellow (on the test pattern, it would be, if it was not tilted in the post, on the left side of the color bars. Here it's in the bottom). It is the same for every other color. It's also the case for red and magenta on the other far side, when it is very light. For grey, it is perceptible all along the bar.

I guess it is directly or indirectly related to alignment because I cannot seem to get a proper alignment, especialy for grey, and now grey has the worst branding.

At the time of post #42, grey was less clearly affected. Why, I don't know.

@ghwellsjr : I am mailing you the full resolution scan of the test pattern.

 

[ghwellsjr]

Now that I see the original that you emailed me, I can see what you are talking about in post #61.

My first question is: When you printed this, was it rotated from the way it appears in the post? In other words, did the print head scan each color bar separately, one at a time, starting with blue and ending with grey? I'm pretty sure that is the case but want to make absolutely clear.

Now I need to know what all the settings were when you made this print. In other words, what type of paper did you tell the printer you were using and what type of paper did you actually use? Where did you feed the paper from, the back or the bottom? What print quality did you select? What was the halftoning set to? (You have to set the quality to custom to see this.) What is Color Adjustment set to? I need to know all the settings on the main tab.

Also, check your alignment settings and list all the numbers.

 

[ghwellsjr]

I was thinking today, the printout that you get when you got to the printer's Maintenance/Print Head Alignment/Check Setting button probably prints out a small section of all the colors that can have alignment problems. So after you do the color bar test, print out the alignment settings and see if the same striping occurs there that you have in the color bar test, especially for the cyan and magenta colors.

 

[vilrockerdefer]

When you printed this, was it rotated from the way it appears in the post? [...]

It was printed in landscape mode (not rotated from the way it appears in the post), quality 1, halftoning auto, on plain paper, telling the printer it was professional photo paper. The paper was fed from the back. The color management was totally off.

The numbers I get with manual alignment are : A0 B1 C1 D0 E0 F1 G0 H1 I-2 J1 K0 L0 M-2 N-2

 

[leo8088]

I am refilling third party refillable cartridges with third-party ink.

I believe this is the root cause of your problem. Some nozzles are clogged because of the 3rd party refillable carts/ink. I know it's easy to say this and not easy to prove. But from experience I have seen this many times. I believe I had an older canon printer that had tiny banding like this before. I though it was an alignment problem too but it wasn't. Switching back to OEM ink cartridges did nothing to improve or fix it. I believe I was able to fix it by using an empty OEM cartridge filled with a platen glass cleaner from Xerox. It was an expensive glass cleaner. But it was available to me so I tried it. It fixed it after letting it sit for a couple of days. I gave away the printer to a high school kid of my neighbor who is in college now.

I can't prove what I think it is. But this kind of problem is very likely a clogging of some nozzles. You probably should stop using the 3rd party stuff. Use OEM or at least refill OEM carts with good quality ink for a while before the print head gets damaged.