Ailing printead of IP3000. Possible Options ?.

[Artur5]

The printhead of my Ip3000 is starting to give me problems. Many nozzles on the smaller cyan rows are clogged or dead, No amount of manual or automated cleaning has solved the issue at all. I suspect that this printhead won’t last long. I know these symptoms.

I’m faced with several options :
- 1- Buy a new printhead from a reputed Canon reseller ( 70-75 euro shipping included)
- 2- Try my luck at the Chinese lottery-> i.e. get an “unused and original” printhead at Ebay/Aliexpress (25-30 euro with shipping )
- 3- Buy a Canon Megatank G1500 printer and forget about cartridge maintenance. (210 euro at Canon’s store)
- 4 -Do nothing and use the IP3000 solely for printing text until the black nozzles fail as well. ( 0 euro )

After some bad experiences, I’ve decided to discard option n.2. Period.
If those G printers were quite cheap, I’d take the plunge right now but, for their specifications, they’re expensive.
Also, it seems that Canon uses a poor OEM ink in these bottles, if compared to what they put in their regular cartridges. This wouldn’t be a problem for me, though. When the original Canon bottles are exhausted, I’d buy the ink from my current third party supplier,
I’m mostly concerned about sturdiness and reliability of the Megatank models. I suspect than, in this matter, they can’t compete with the trusty Pixmas of the IP4000 to IP4500 era.
My IP3000 has printed about 33000 pages and is still doing fine, although I reckon that a bit of lubing would do no harm, because it makes scary grinding noises.
Another question about G series : Spare printheads. In the manual there’s no mention of a Ref. number for this part and possibly they won’t be available for sale to the final user. I may be wrong. Anybody here knows something about this ? If I can’t buy spare printheads, it’s a deal breaker for me.
What do you advice, guys : buy a new printhead for the IP3000 or a G1500 printer ?
For color printing I use almost exclusively a Pro9000. The IP3000 is dedicated to print text on plain paper. So, the presumably mediocre color output of the G1500 wouldn’t matter much.

 

[The Hat]

@Artur5, Buy a mono laser printer and for everything else use the 9000...

 

[Artur5]

Thanks Hat. I thought of laser printers in the past, but a bit of research revealed that the cost in toner per page is several times more than what I’m paying now for third party pigmented black ink.

 

[arw4]

@Artur5 I'd be inclined to go for your option 4, but possibly have a backup plan if and when your ip3000 finally fails. I agree that the ip3000 belongs to a well built generation of printers. I owned the ip4000 and ip5000 back in the day, and they both served me well. It was the printhead that finally failed with my printers, and I faced a similar decision. I, too, was tempted to buy a new printhead, but in the end I decided to replace the printers altogether. The reasons:

1. A brand new printer with a set of starter inks cost less than a new printhead.
2. Replacing the printhead is a bit of a gamble. Yes, there's a very good chance it will fix the problem, but you have to question what might fail or cause problems for you next. 33,000 pages is pretty good going!

For me, replacing ink in cartridges is not a problem, so I wouldn't personally choose option 3 from your list. But that's something for you to decide.

Just picking up on your point about lubing your ip3000. I'd be wary about adding any lubricants. By inspecting the moving parts with a torch, you will quite often see excess lubricant where it has got pushed along with the mechanism. If anything, I would be more inclined to carefully redistribute this so moving parts are tended once again, if necessary.

 

[Artur5]

Thanks for your opinion.
Yes, 33000 pages isn’t bad.
After my IP4000 and IP4500 saw their printheads fail when Canon had discontinued the spare parts, I bough this IP3000 secondhand, On arrival, it had printed already more than 20000 pages, but it was still in very good shape.
Curiously enough, the service manual for this model rates the life expectancy for 3 years or 6000 pages (whichever comes first) while for the IP4000 it’s 5 years or 18000 pages. That seems odd. Having owned both printers, they seem practically twins as far as mechanical parts are concerned. It looks as if Canon was quite pessimistic about the durability of the IP3000.

I’m following your sensible advice and opting for solution 4. In the future I don’t consider a new regular Pixma. The current entry models look flimsy and also those small opaque cartridges are much more difficult to refill and reset. Megatank G series machines may be not up to older Pixma standards of reliability but at least they’re free from troublesome chips and sponge problems.

 

[The Hat]

Yes, 33000 pages isn’t bad.

@Artur5, I got a iP4500 that refuses to die, it has more than 54,000 on its original head...
I did however get a Maxify to replace it, but it's still not needed...

 

[Artur5]

54000 pages on the same printhead it’s a sheer miracle. I’m informing the Guinness Records publishers, so your IP4500 will appear on next edition.

I don’t keep track of the pages that I’ve got from my Canon printheads but surely I never reached 10000 with any of them... probably a lot less.

 

[The Hat]

I don’t keep track of the pages that I’ve got from my Canon printheads but surely I never reached 10000 with any of them... probably a lot less.

My i865 print head reached just 10,000, plus 4 or 5 and I got an error message saying it had developed a fault, right in the middle of a print run, but it hadn’t, and after getting a new head and installing that, I later put back in the first head and it ran for another six months...

Run Service Mode and it will give you the printer life history...
There’s mechanically dead and there’s Canon software dead...

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Curiously enough, the service manual for this model rates the life expectancy for 3 years or 6000 pages

Those numbers have a very wide variance, and it's not the page count wearing out a printhead but the amount of ink fired through the nozzles , these numbers of life expectancy are used for something else - to accept or decline warranty claims which might be beyond these limits - you can print more than 6000 pages in half a year and Canon may decline service because the print volume would indicate usage in a professional environment - implying that you wouldn't print that much that quick in a short period at home. I had several of such cases with Canon in the past. It's somewhat similar with Epson printers, they specify a typical usage rate e.g. 30 000 pages /year ( which is not an expected/estimated lifetime/failure rate) and their extended warranty for e.g. 3 years may be limited to such a number /page count. It's pretty much hidden in the fine print at the end, with some complicated and misleading wording of the conditions to make you overlook such restrictions.

 

[arw4]

It's pretty much hidden in the fine print at the end, with some complicated and misleading wording of the conditions to make you overlook such restrictions.

It always seems somewhat underhanded in the way manufacturers impose these restrictions and limitations on warranty issues in terms of product life expectancy. Invariably, the consumer rarely knows the terms until after money has changed hands and the purchase has been made, and probably in most cases only when it becomes a warranty issue. I fully understand and accept that manufacturers have got to take reasonable steps to protect themselves, but the terms should be made clear at the point of sale. In essence, a purchase constitutes a warranty agreement.