Printhead damaged by intensive black only printing

[gigigogu]

Last 2 days I printed about 2000 pages of black only text on Pixma IP5000.
Before that, the nozzle check was ok. After, exactly a quarter of cyan, yellow and dye black nozzles were gone.

This happened also some time ago with yellow in my first Pixma IP4500, in similar circumstances.

All I can conclude that kind of printing is risky .

 

[panos]

This happened to me when I was using low quality inks and/or top filling method but once I dealt with those issues, large volume printing (mostly black text) was no longer a problem.

 

[stratman]

Has printing function returned to normal? What did you do to fix it?

 

[The Hat]

I do thousands of colour and text pages regularly on my Canon printers and have never suffered any problems like that.
But as panos said it could be down to poor quality ink, refilling incorrectly or both..

 

[gigigogu]

panos, The Hat

I admit the ink used was not the best but not junk either, and I had no previous clogging issues with it. Also the cartridges were filled correctly (OEM cartridges, freedom method).

How alleged poor ink can damage a printhead like this, in only 2 days? Friday the nozzle check was ok, Sunday the lower halves of cyan and dye black were of 50% intensity and yellow with a gap in middle. Was not clogging, or purge unit malfunction (tested, it was ok).

After I removed the printhead I cleaned the contacts on carriage and printhead, cleaned the ink around the ceramic plate and flexible PCB strip and surprise, the dye black was good again, but after a second cleaning the dye black was malfunctioning again and stayed like that no mater what I did.

Also the printer at one moment started to behave strangely, printing few lines, taking a break, printing again, carriage not moving after the lid was opened and so on, with the message "Printer is busy'" on status monitor. To clear this I had to unplug the USB cable and power cable and after that it behaved normal again.

 

[ghwellsjr]

Your description of the missing nozzles sounds like an electrical problem to me. I don't see how any kind of ink or refill method would lead to an electrical problem but it does happen spontaneously in Canon printers. Only rarely does it go away. Usually a new print head is required.

 

[gigigogu]

Well, the missing nozzles was just the first sign that something is wrong. Yesterday it started to give errors.

After a print job is sent to printer it starts to print but depending of printing mode it gives one of the errors Paper feed error [6000], Paper feed position error [6B00] or Carriage error [5100].
As a result it cannot print in automatic duplex or high speed, and prints only 30 - 50 pages in normal mode before error occurs.

That's it, anyway I was going to retire it.