Printing After a Five-week Idle Period

As mentioned in my last posting, it's been some time since I've made a print. The print job history the Mac keeps shows it's been five weeks; that's a record for me, the longest time between prints since I've owned the 7900.

Yesterday I made prints of two of my photos, along with four panoramic prints for a client. I started as usual, running a nozzle-check print. This was perfect. I then made a small print on a sheet of Epson luster. This was cut from the 24-inch roll the last time I nested several prints into one job and had some reasonable sized "scrap" pieces left after cutting the pictures apart. The print was unacceptable; clearly too magenta. Below is a photo of the area where ink delivery (LC, as it turns out) failed. At the top of the print, all's well.

But you can see clearly when banding starts, and you can see the white feathers of the snowy owl are anything but white (the print's better than it looks, but I bumped up the contrast in the jpeg at left so the banding would be clearly seen).

I printed another nozzle check, and sure enough, LC was completely gone. I then did a standard cleaning of the VLM/LC pair. This returned only about half the LC nozzles, so I did a powerful cleaning of the same pair.

That cleared the LC nozzles, but the check print showed a few missing dots in the patterns of several other colors. As it was no more than a couple of dots in three colors, I made a second print of the owl photo. This time, the print looked perfect, with no banding, and accurate color.

My next print was a larger B&W print on a sheet of EEF. You can see the image in a recent article on my site. The bottom (final) photo is the one I printed. It too looks great, with neutral grays and white whites.

I then made the client's panorama prints using the roll of luster. They too are very nice.

I've read numerous reports of situations like that described above; it's happened to others. A nozzle check is perfect, but the next "real" print is not. There are endless opinions about why, but as usual, few (or no) facts. It seems reasonable to conclude that, especially when the printer's been idle for some time, it's best to make a "junk" print, something that pumps more ink through the delivery system than a nozzle-check print, allow the printer to "rest" a few minutes, and then run a nozzle check. That junk print might best be one of the handful of test files available on the Web, created by people attempting to find a pattern that fires all nozzles. This preamble to printing is a big time-sink, and as usual with these printers, guarantees nothing. But perhaps it improves the chances of not wasting a sheet of good paper.

  --Jay