Help needed with odd MP610 nozzle check

Hello all -
I've received excellent advice from folks on this forum in years past, and I hope you can help me again. I've been having problems with my Pixma MP610 printer. I use OEM cartridges which I refill with Hobbicolors ink.

About a month ago, I inserted a refilled PGI-5Bk cartridge and the cart didn't feed ink properly - text printing at normal quality would show dropouts and missing lines (this has occasionally happened to me when a cart has been refilled too many times and starts getting clogged with pigment residue). The cart would still print text fine if I set the printer to "high" quality, so I was lazy about replacing it and waited several weeks to do so. I finally replaced it last week; the replacement PGI-5BK cart works fine, but now for some reason I'm having problems with the color carts. This may just be a coincidence - I understand how a misfeeding pigment cart could have burned out the text portion of the printhead, but I can't imagine how a bad black pigment cart could have messed up the color portion of the printhead - but perhaps this history will help someone diagnose the problem.

I did a deep cleaning from the printer utility panel, then printed out both a nozzle check test and an extended nozzle check test (from service mode):


I'm puzzled by the first cyan band - as you can see, the top half is much darker than the bottom half, and the perfectly neat line between the two implies to me that this is not clogged nozzle issue. I'm also concerned bout the Yellow band - I think this test shows a band only half the width that it should be, and there also appears to be a tiny bit of black contamination.

Here's the extended nozzle check (printed from service mode):


The missing rectangular blocks from the cyan check are a problem, and I think that the large color bands are the wrong color?

I replaced the magenta, cyan, and yellow carts and then reran both tests. The results were identical. My fear is that these test results indicate an electrical problem in the printhead, and that the printhead is therefore toast. Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated!

Zack

Addendum to above post - I forgot to mention that I also pulled the printhead and did a quick examination. Everything looked fine, I gently removed a slight build up of ink on the exterior by resting the printhead on a paper towel moistened with distilled water, then reinstalled the printhead and reran the nozzle checks. The results were unchanged.

Zack

zack23 said:

Addendum to above post - I forgot to mention that I also pulled the printhead and did a quick examination. Everything looked fine, I gently removed a slight build up of ink on the exterior by resting the printhead on a paper towel moistened with distilled water, then reinstalled the printhead and reran the nozzle checks. The results were unchanged.
Zack

Click to expand...

Hi Zack, now for whatever reason your print heads is indeed toast and so you will require a new one, they are no longer available from Canon (Discontinued).

Try here and see what you think.

http://www.inkjetprinthead.com/canon-printhead-for-ip4500-mp610-mp810_1.htm

It is however quite possible that when you printed your text document it used the colour inks and not the PGl black and the colour heads were clogged up from lack of use at that time and you didn’t notice them because you taught you were using only the PGl black.

Some text documents will use only the PGl black to print and some will use all of the colours like a PDF for instance, so that’s probably what happened to your print head, it is usually fatal to print anything other than a nozzle print when you have clogged nozzles, sorry..

Thanks for the fast reply, though the news is bad! Do you think there is any danger that my logic board has been damaged, and that if I spend $85-100 for a new printhead it will in turn be burned out by the logic board after I install it? This happened to me once before with a previous printer...

Normally I would say unlikely, but if it has happen to you once before then be careful when installing any print head just make sure it’s not still damp from any cleaning you may have done prior to installation.

Look on the bright side it can’t happen to you again, lighting doesn’t strike the same place twice, I am told..

Thanks! What are my options if I choose not to risk installing a new printhead? I haven't been following the recent generation of Canon printers, but my understanding is that the carts are difficult if not impossible to refill? Are there other brand printers that are currently recommended for those who like to refill carts?