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

[The Hat]

Hi @Pavel, Why not run a manual Head alignment instead of an Auto one, that should take care of any misalignment...

 

[Harvey]

Hey Hat, once you get this fuzzy black problem no matter how hard you try to align the head you will get the same results. Perhaps Pavel´s printer just needs a printhead alignment, that is the reason why I asked a nozzle test scan.

 

[Pavel]

Hi,
my intention is to print HQ photos on all my ink-jet printers - I'm looking for maximum achievable quality all the time. I also run my own color management usign spectrophotometers. It means I always align heads manually and print with High quality setting and for selected papers even with highest setting (1) available only for Platinum Photo paper media setting. I also have custom made ICC profile in place for each paper/ink combination I use.
No matter how precisely you allign the head, you get blurry/fuzzy BK on nozzle check print. When you look closely at the dots, there are very different areas of drops distribution. It should be evenly distrubuted. It results in blurry and strongly "noisy" colors because some drops of BK are probably used when you print almost all colors - from mid tone to dark.
Sorry for poor quality of the inserted image, I don't have better scanner available at the moment.
All pairs of bars (not only BK) on the left side of the nozzle check print are more or less blurry/fuzzy, because they are not printed only using Y, M, C, GY nozzles, but BK is used there.
Only PGBK bars are sharp, because the are printed with PGBK nozzles, which are not affected.
All other colors look nice and when you look carefully with magnifying glass, the dots are evenly distributed within the whole area of nozzle check.

In fact I do not understand what's going on inside. In case this has nothing to do with electrical problem of any type, it has to be mechanical misalignment. This might be caused by some residuum of old ink inside nozzle channels, which affects the direction of ejected bubble. But why you are not able to dissolve this and clear the channel ?
Or the nozzle is completely clear but mechanically damaged / bended ? I expect the nozzle itself to be made from a heat-resistive material, so why it should be damaged this way ?
I would fully understand that you can overheat the heating element, which burns and thus the nozzle is dead. But this is not the case.
Still lot of questionmarks for me...

Pavel

 

[Harvey]

Hi Pavel, as you might have noticed all of the black nozzles fire, but in a bad way. At first I thought it was just a mere misalignment problem. I thouhgt that it was time to align the head. Well, this method did not work. The black/gray alignment blocks are not printed well, not the same case with the cyan ones. I just came to think this is just an electrical problem in the printhead. If the ink has a bad coolant in it, I guess the nozzles will burn and lines would appear, but it´s not the case.

I have cleaned the head thoroughly, sprayed it with contact cleaner and nothing will help. Any other color droplets are fine. The black band in the nozzle check print looks fuzzy only in the center. Upper and lower parts appears to be printed correctly. Perhaps is just bad ink with low quality thermal agents that le the nozzles warp, and let it crippled irreversibly.

Maybe the printhead was intentionally designed to be be picky/weak in the black nozzles or it is just a low quality black ink fault. Perhaps it is just a preprogrammed error. Or it is simply an electrical failure rendering the black irremediously bad. I had never seen this fuzzy in pre CLI- 221 generation printer, so it is wether a picky head or it is just the ink fault for this new 221 series. I would like to see some comments on this.

 

[PeterBJ]

There have also been reports of PGBK nozzles becoming misaligned in printers of the CLI-x51 generation, see this thread.

 

[The Hat]

@Harvey, I still say your BK black looks very strange, I don’t know what type of ink your using but it seems very watery to me, was the sponge still wet whey you refilled the black cartridge. ?

You are trying to explain away the fuzziness on everything but the black ink, if your ink was diluted with another substance (Water ?) it could cause the strange nozzle prints you’re getting, it also could be very poor quality ink ?

Try installing a new OEM BK black cartridge and run 6 or 7 test sheets, then print another nozzle check, and this is how burned out nozzles look on a nozzle print, note the two vertical bars are unaffected.
click to enlarge.
I use the same BK black in my dye printers and don’t suffer from this fuzziness in any of these nozzles print (See post #8) one head has over 54,000 on 3rd party ink, once you have electrical problems they only get worse, never better...

 

[Harvey]

@The Hat I am using this forum member ink from Canada (no problem with this ink). However I had another ink I used to get for years without any trouble, which is the one I think caused the trouble. In the printheads I used this is where I have seen the fuzzines. The sponge was wet, the cartridge was anOEM BK. As soon as its ink was used it was refilled, so it had no time laying around.