WARNING: Canon's current OEM yellow ink Chromalife 100+ Yellow 251/551/271/571 et al

[Harvey]

Notice how the fuzzy black problem spreads to other colors. Some fine details like hair or vertical fine striped shirts are not printed correctly due to this problem. Perhaps Canon knew this or maybe not, but once the photo black gets damaged the other colors suffer from this defect.

It is true that by using high quality setting black apparently prints fine with no lines/streaks in solid black areas. Black lines have no detail and look blurry.

 

[pharmacist]

I have been comtemplating about this issue and my idea (which I mentioned before) is that this new yellow dye is a phase change dye, which behaves like a pigment when thoroughly dried, which makes a undissolvable pigment once printed on paper an dried, enhancing its archival properties. It probably triggers some kind of a polymerization process curing the yellow dye/pigment onto the printed surface, drastically enhancing the archival properties of this new type of dye. The drawback of this the yellow jello problem.

 

[The Hat]

@Harvey, whether the black ink is causing print head longevity problems or not is pure conjecture, but you must be aware that in printing a colour photo your printer can achieve this perfectly without the use of any black ink, even for the darkest areas.

Both black and grey are only used as highlighter and toners to give your photos better depth and shading, the printer only needs 3 colours to make a photo and all other colours are just optional extras, the extra colours do however make for a better photo, especially greys but not photo black.

Here is an example of a colour swatch made up with 3 colours...

Examining your nozzle print below, I have noticed there seems to be something wrong with your BK black, I can’t hazard a guess as to what, but notice the black blocks on either side of the C, M, Y, GY are all correctly black, but the BK blocks are much lighter...

 

[Harvey]

Hi Hat, as you mentioned only 3 colors are required to produce any color, it is the principle of RGB. Photo black just gives deeper blacks and I less ink from C, Y, M is used, so some ink is saved and other colors are used in much smaller proportions to print different dark tones. Again, it is just my observation that printing without gray gives way better longevity results, when prints are left unattended/open air.

It is a fact that my BK is not printing right, if you pay close attention to lighter blocks they have some imperfection caused by BK not being good. They dont have definition, some kind of haze plagues them. The black blocks also have this problem, but being dark covers the problem. I will post a better image to show the problem caused by the fuzzy black.

 

[Harvey]

The area in the blue rectangle is not defined, it has some kind of blur. The edges marked by the red rectangle are not defined, they are like smeared. This is the darkest M patch which looked black in my previous post. I hope this scan let you see things clearer.

 

[Harvey]

Here you can see the patches which looked black and good. Also there is a lighter Magenta patch similar to BK blocks. Sorry for the big images. @The Hat let me know if I set them as thumbnails.

 

[Harvey]

This was printed in the same sheet, with the same ink and high quality.

 

[Harvey]

Here is what I mentioned before, prints without gray look better after some days. These images were printed on March 28th one after another on the same sheet. You can see the red cast in the hair and overall color looks muted and pale in the bottom images. Again you can see the the fuzzy black printhead wont print good hair.

 

[Pavel]

Hi everybody,
I can confirm such kind of behavior on MG7150 which I got recently. It has been probably run using some cheap chinesse ink by previous owner, cca 2800 pages printed - probably mostly office documents, but I do'nt know for sure.
Dye black nozzles (BK) are strongly misaligned, photo printing is not possible, results are not acceptable at all.
It was very strange behavior for me, I haven't seen something like this before - so now things are clearer.
Looks like Canon always knows how to "upgrade" next generation of printers in a smart way ...

Pavel

 

[Harvey]

It is good to know this thread has been useful to you in any way. I hope you can share your print nozzle scan/photo. Even if your printer has the fuzzy/misaligned black, it should be able to print photos. Have you tried printing in high quality? Often the bad quality photo printing is solved by using hiqh quality. This way you avoid in some way the fuzzy black problem and lets you print photos.