The 7900 has been idle (powered up, but in sleep mode) for about 36 hours. I still have a couple of gloss papers/profiles to test. Recent experience has shown I need to print a nozzle check before running any print jobs, so I did that as before, with plain bond paper. This showed the light black nozzles clogged, with nearly half of them missing (that is, about half the LK pattern was blank). I ran a cleaning on the MK-PK/LK channel pair. This seemed to take a very long time -- 16 minutes, in fact. When the cleaning finished I printed another nozzle check.
The LK channel looked fine, but there were a few small voids in the O channel, so I ran a cleaning of the O/G pair. This took about 12 minutes. Another nozzle check print showed O was cleared, but now VM had some missing lines, so yet another cleaning, this time of the C/VM pair. When that finished (under 10 minutes) the printer's LCD reported a cleaning failure, but I could find no missing or sloppy lines on any channels when I examined them with my 8x loupe. Enough with cleaning.
I ran a profile eval print using Harman Gloss FB Al and a profile received from a friend. The results aren't bad, but I can't differentiate the darkest blacks as well as I can with the GGFS and EEF. This paper/profile combination also suffers from the previously-described inversion in the light green color ramp on the eval image. Overall, the color images on the eval page look fine. Most likely this is not a paper I'll use, but not because of the profile's performance. I could try the profile from Harman, too, if I liked the paper better. In fact I do like the paper, but I've found a high number of flaws in the surface of the sheets in my sample pack. Given that GGFS and EEF papers cover most of my needs for papers with these types of surfaces, the Harman's surface issues push it down the list for me.
--Jay
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