Steaky printer - any ideas or suggestions?

[swee'pea99]

I just bought an old Canon W2200 printer off ebay. I know these are fantastic printers, because I've had one before. And this one is no exception, except that it seems to be a bit streaky. Every print appears pretty good, but when you look reasonably closely, it becomes clear that it's actually not one clear image, but a series of 'bands', perhaps 1-2cm wide. It's hard to describe, but checkout the pic...

Any thoughts? Thanks.

 

[jamsarnie]

Blocked print head?

Not wishing to teach you to suck eggs, but have you run the clean print head function within the printer software?

 

[Linford]

A Steaky Printer Mmmmmmm

Seriously though for a minute, you need to run a cleaning cycle on it. There should be a disc which came with the printer with the program to do this, and if that is lost, then you can go to the canon website and usually download the utility from there .

 

[swee'pea99]

Thanks chaps, should've thought of that. I just assumed maybe a faulty roller or something, but running a head cleaning cycle does sound like a sound idea. Incidentally, does anyone have any idea of the lifespan of a large format inkjet printer? Apparently this one's done about 85,000 prints, which sounds like rather a lot.

 

[Linford]

If they are regulary serviced, you can get 150,000 copies out of a photocopier. I appreciate it is an inkjet, but they are mechanical devices at the end of the day.

Most internals can be replaced on younger machines, bit the engineers get to a point where they say that is it - and that is it and it become very expensive to keep them in service.

 

[fossyant]

It's down to the print heads. Most printers now have permanent heads so it's important to run the head cleaning. That photo does indeed look like that, it's not too bad. The other option is also to run head alignment if it has that option.

 

[Norm]

85,000 for a domestic printer is huge but it's bread and butter to a commercial unit.

The other option is also to run head alignment if it has that option.

I think that's the problem. The strips will be the width of your print head and the darker line is where the heads aren't quite aligned and it's covering the same piece of paper twice.

 

[swee'pea99]

Many thanks. I'm pretty sure it has a head alignment option on it as well. (This is a serious top end commercial graphics printer.) I'll run that too.

 

[swee'pea99]

CC comes up trumps once again! Found out it had print head alignment, along with something called banding, and line feed adjustment, plus one other I can't bring to mind right now, and I fiddled around with all of them as per the instructions and bingo! Perfecto! Many thanks all.

 

[fossyant]

Awesome !!! I'll hold you to a pint !