This page suggests a strategy for resolving problems with printer output. We believe that understanding how the printer works and taking a methodical approach when a problem is experienced will help you in the long run. We ignore problems that we consider to be consistent; that is a problem that will possibly appear on every print - issues like this are marks on the print from the pizza wheels and possible overinking / wavyness of the final print due on a particular type of paper. This page is more about how the ink gets onto the page in a way that we want it to.

We assume that you already know how to run the printer utilities ‘Nozzle Check’, ‘Alignment Routine’ and ‘Head Cleaning’ (these are Epson terms, but probably apply to other makes of printer). If you do not know about these utilities, please refer to your printer documentation to find out how to run them.

Before we cover the strategy, we cover a couple of items of ‘good practice’ to printing.

Good Practice

In general, we recommend a nozzle-check be run prior to any important print, or at least at the start of the printing day. This should give you the quick test to see that your printer is working well, and assuming that in general your printer is printing well, a ‘rough’ nozzle check on a scrap of paper should be more than acceptable. Refer to Preventing printer problems for more items that are good practice.

One thing we have occasionally noted with a nozzle-check after first starting the printer up is that the first nozzle check may be close-to-perfect, so we run a clean cycle... and the next nozzle-check output is awful! The same printer, when started up a day or two later, may result in a similarly ‘nearly perfect’ check on startup, but on some occasions we choose not to run a clean cycle, and instead to run another nozzle check. Believe it or not, sometimes this simple approach produces a perfcect nozzle check. The only guidance we can give as to when to conduct this procedure is ‘gut feeling’.

The Strategy

For the strategy, we are assuming that you have been working with a printer that normally provides good results. This is important, or at least that you are familiar with general printer operation, as we will be recommending that you run some prints that will be advantageous that you have seen output from a working printer, so that you can understand the output from a printer that is not working.

So here’s the scene; you have run off a print (we will assume photographic), and you can see a problem. Here are the tools you will need to identify the cause of the problem (linked items have separate pages dedicated to them):

• Analyse Larger photographic print - this may be the print that highlighted the issue to you in the first place. Examining the print in detail, possibly in conjunction with the output created above, will assist you in identifying a problem;
• Rough Nozzle Check - to give you a quick check of nozzle firing patterns;
• Detailed Nozzle Check - to examine nozzle output in detail;
• Small Graphic print - to check that the output from the nozzle check reflects the reality of a graphic print;
• Purge prints to encourage the printing of one particular colour ink over another.

Step One

We said that we are assuming that your printer basically works well and that you will have just found a problem in one of your prints to be carrying out this procedure. Look at your print! What is wrong with it? Assess what is wrong, and in conjunction with our detailed page on the subject (Analysing the Print), take a guess at the problem you are seeing. It is a lot easier to resolve problems that are consistent, than ones that are changing.

Step Two

Depending upon the last time you ran a nozzle-check, run a rough and then ‘detailed’ nozzle-check, following our advice in the Detailed Nozzle Check article. The rough nozzle check may provide you all you need to know (misfiring nozzles are often easy to see, for example, even in a rough nozzle check). However, you can also gain useful information by running a cleaning cycle in-between the nozzle-checks: if the nozzle check essentially does not improve or change much between cleans, then you can start to think of your problem as being static... but if the nozzle check improves then you may have solved your problem. Go back to step one and take a look at a print, or continue on...

Step Three

Print and analyse a small, well known, bold graphic print. We aim to provide one in due course, but we suggest a few squares of solid colours; maybe a white, black, mid-grey, light-grey, R, G, B and C, M, Y squares of colour... perhaps each about and inch square. You should set this up so several can be fitted onto the same sheet of paper. You really need to keep a reference print from a known-good printer (or your own printer, when you knew it was working well!)

This test achieves several things; sometimes, cleaning cycles can be too aggressive and create problems, so this encourages ink out of the nozzles by ‘gentle’ persuasion. Second, by using solid blocks of colour, you can closely examine the print patterns of the dots under a loupe, without worrying about the interactions of tonal progressions on the print. Finally, this test is a good test of consistent ink flow. We know that in the neutral grey squares, for example, should have roughly equal amounts of CMY (or cmY) inks laid down. If one or more of your grey squares print with a strong colour, then you can know that one complete print colour is misfiring dramatically. Whilst it is a rare condition, it is possible for a perfect nozzle check to be followed by virtually no ink flow from a print head.

Whichever way, this final part of the test is a great validator of all that you have done before.

We hope that you have found this rough strategy useful to you, and hope that you are able to resolved your problem quickly.

Please note that MWORDS has closed. We aim to retain these support pages in the hope that they may benefit our past customers, but regret that we can no longer offer further comment or support in relation to the information above.