Consistently Inconsistent

My apologies for the long silence. Many distractions this time of year, not the least of which is photographing spring flowers and our sometimes interesting weather piling up against the west slopes of the Mission Mountains. I've not been printing much, so there's been little to report.

The 7900 was set up for printing on matte papers (MK was loaded), thanks to some client printing I wrapped up a couple of weeks ago. I recently needed to print a couple of small prints for a client, who wanted them right away to be framed and hung the next day. Her files were in pretty good shape; the job wouldn't require much of my time. But it would require swapping MK for PK.

I ran the process as usual: just press the button and wait a few minutes. When I've done this before, the printer would show a progress bar while swapping ink, report the switch was finished, and then run a cleaning cycle. Then, upon making the first print, it would run a second cleaning cycle. It has done this second cleaning only when switching from MK to PK (not going in the other direction). Until now the machine had always behaved this way. I've confirmed with friend Dean that his 7900 does this in exactly the same way: one cleaning cycle when swapping PK to MK, but two cleanings when swapping MK to PK. The last time I did this swap, because my LK and LLK inks are somewhere under 1%, to complete the cleaning the printer required that I install new inks for those channels. After the cleaning I removed the full cartridges and installed the near-empty ones. Those have been in place since my last swap.

This time, however, the machine behaved quite differently. I initiated the switch. When the process completed, I printed a nozzle check. The printer did NOT run a cleaning cycle before printing. It also did not require swapping the 1% cartridges for full ones.

After the nozzle check (no problems), I made the two client prints, one on GGFS, the other on EEF. Again, no cleanings, no requirement to install the full cartridges.

I've no idea why the thing behaved so differently this time. No complaints, of course, but I would have expected the process to run just as it has several times in the past.

  --Jay