Another Ink Replacement Failure

It's been a maddening week here. I'm about to leave for a short camping trip, immediately followed by a trip east to visit my parents. As often happens, client work has come in steadily, all of which required quick turn-around while I should have been preparing for these trips. Clients don't care about my trips, commitments I've made to other clients, or my desire to relax for a day or two. Fair enough; I do my best to accommodate them.

The 7900 had been idle for a couple of weeks, and has been busy since. Every day's start-up began with a nozzle check that showed the need for cleanings. Every day. As my printer currently has six inks at 5% or lower capacity, cleanings invariably require swapping one or more of those inks for new cartridges. When a clean nozzle check print finally emerges, I replace those fuller cartridges with the originals, most of which are at 1%. This is standard procedure for the 7900, but is tedious and takes a lot of time. What should be a quick printing job can often require an hour or more. Such is life with a 7900.

OK, to the real issue for this posting: In my last post, waaaay back in April, I wrote about the printer stopping in mid-print because an ink cartridge had reached the empty state. The printer allows one to replace that cartridge with a new one, after which the print continues. This is widely reported to work just fine, and in fact has done in my own experience. Then I had the issue reported in the previous posting.

For my most recent job I'd been hired to reproduce several very large oil paintings. I photographed these, color-corrected the resulting files, and started making prints. The job required a number of prints, which I spread out over three days. On the final day I had only one print to make, this one fairly large. The start-up nozzle check showed LLK missing completely. A standard cleaning of the Y/LLK pair resolved this, so I loaded the roll paper and printed.

After printing several inches of the image the printer stopped, reporting an empty VLM cartridge must be replaced. I did that, and the machine continued printing. With horrible results. I canceled the print job. Below is a small section from the "master" file:

Here is a photo of the failed print. I made no effort to color-correct the jpeg for this posting, but you can clearly see the band of magenta in the lower half of the crop:

I removed the roll paper and ran a nozzle check as usual on a sheet of bond paper. This showed the LC channel missing completely. This should have nothing to do with the VLM cartridge swap, and it would seem the LC channel was fine before the machine required that VLM replacement.

Frustrated and more than a little angry, I quit for the day; it was getting late, and I really wanted to wrap up the job, but I knew better than to keep going. Next morning I ran a nozzle check and found no change, with VLM still absent. A powerful cleaning of the LC/VLM pair cleared most of the VLM nozzles. I set up and ran the print, which looked good.

Yet another new experience with the 7900, yet another way to produce scrap and waste time. Some days this machine is not good for my blood pressure. I've now been bitten twice by this "bug." I think the lesson here is that I can't trust the printer to continue properly when an ink cartridge must be replaced mid-print. Instead, I'll cancel the job, scrap the print, replace the ink, run a nozzle check, do whatever cleanings seem necessary, and then, finally, start the print job anew. Yes, this sucks, and shouldn't be necessary, but at least with my machine, clearly is.

  --Jay