Single colour streaking

[Konrad Chan]

I have a CISS setup with my Canon MG3570. It looks like the Magenta is smudging horizontally when I print. I did the Nozzle cleaning and pressurised the ink tanks with the syringe. Those did help resolve other issues like colour intensity and banding (though it looks like I still have banding issues after that). I'm mostly frustrated about the way the Magenta is behaving and I'm not sure where to go from here. Any advice would be much appreciated!

 

[PeterBJ]

The prints show a typical pattern of the magenta nozzles failing, not the typical wedge shaped pattern of ink starvation. The MG3570 is a two cartridge printer so to correct the error you need a new tri-colour cartridge. I think the magenta nozzles cannot be cleaned to correct the error as they appear damaged.

I think the CISS is now properly installed as the cyan, yellow and black inks seem to be feeding properly.

The printheads in the cartridges are thermal meaning a steady supply of ink is necessary to cool the nozzles. Without this cooling the nozzles could easily be damaged. Maybe the damage was caused during the setup of the CISS with too little ink supply caused by a wrong position of the reservoir or the supply lines not properly primed? The image of the cartridge alignment also shows beginning damage of the cyan nozzles. Could the inks be unsuitable for the printer and so cause the damage?

 

[Konrad Chan]

Thank you so much for this, Peter. I wouldn't know where to begin finding this information out on my own. I'll go ahead and find a replacement cartridge. I would hope the inks aren't the problem, because I ordered everything as a set. Maybe I need to do some research on that then. In regards to the thermal nature of the cartridges, you're saying if they aren't cooled down by regular printing that they can become damaged? That may be it then. I think we left the printer idle for a month. (I'm sure I was pretty clumsy with the initial setup as well).
Though I am confused why I'm seeing traces of magenta on the bars beside "C" and "Y". Or is that just characteristic of a damaged nozzle?

 

[PeterBJ]

No, pausing between printings don't harm. I meant that during printing a steady supply of ink must be available to cool the nozzles.

The vertical bars at the left hand side of the nozzle check are mixed from the cyan, magenta and yellow inks and should appear a neutral grey, so magenta is used in all bars except those for black. The traces of magenta on the right hand side of the bars could be caused by a delayed action printing of the damaged nozzles.

 

[Konrad Chan]

Oh, interesting. I see... in that case, could the damage been caused because we printed a large PDF document with insufficient ink flow? I think we did that, when some colours weren't coming out, but we printed anyway. In that case the act of printing heated up the dry nozzle and may have damaged it. Did I understand that correctly?

 

[PeterBJ]

Yes, you understood 100% correctly.