Canon MP640 not printing black

[dgibbo777]

Hi all. Am back on the forum looking for help again. Everyone was so helpful last time (especially ghwellsjr), was hoping for some assistance.

My MP640, which is 3 months out of warranty, has stopped printing black. All other colours print fine. If I do a nozzle check, the top row for black is missing (where you'd expect to see PGBK). I've changed both black cartridges with new original Canon ones, so they are full. If I perform a Cleaning, the next print I do works fine, then stops working again after that.

Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance,
David

 

[ghwellsjr]

This kind of problem is particularly frustrating. First off, the wide black cartridge is the only one that is giving you a problem so don't worry about the thin one--it is used on photo papers. In fact, here's a trick you can use if you're desperate to print something on plain paper in black only, just tell the printer you are printing on matte paper and it will use the dye black ink from your thin cartridge.

However, you don't want to let your problem with the pigment black ink go on for too long or it may make it more difficult to solve it later on or it may turn into burned out nozzles.

The first question is, what kind of cartridges have you been using before you tried the original Canon ones and if you refilled, what kind of ink did you use?

 

[dgibbo777]

Thanks for responding so quickly. Good tip on the matte paper, will use that if I can't resolve this quickly. I'm using the genuine Canon cartridges and always have with the printer, with no refilling.

Regards,
David

 

[ghwellsjr]

You've been doing everything right, using only Canon OEM cartridges, so this shouldn't be happening to you. It's not fair.

You may be having a problem with your purge unit. See this rather long thread which may or may not apply to your case. As long as you are sure you purge unit is working, then the problem seems to be in your print head.

As you can see, you can spend a lot of time trying to fix a problem like you are having. If you don't want to go through that effort, you might want to just go ahead and buy a new print head.

Let us know what you decide to do.

 

[dgibbo777]

Thanks again for the prompt reply. I'll go through the cleaning this evening and see whether the purge unit is working and go from there. Will let you know.

 

[dgibbo777]

Howdy. OK, cleaned the print head and nozzles with windex as well as flooded the purge pads. Nozzle check printed fine after that and have done two prints, 4 hours apart and both have worked fine for now. I'll not celebrate yet and will see how the next few days go, but looks like a good clean may have done the trick. Thanks again for your help and suggestions.

 

[Redbrickman]

Sounds like you have cured the problem.

My own routine and others on the forum is to do a weekly nozzle check if you have not been using the printer.

I do that with both 640's and the 9000, and have no clogging problems.

 

[ghwellsjr]

My own routine and others on the forum is to do a weekly nozzle check if you have not been using the printer.

It's a good idea to do a weekly nozzle check even if you are using your printer. These printers are designed to mask a few clogged nozzles during normal printing so you might be having a problem that eventually results in a burned out nozzle that you would never know about unless you do periodic nozzle checks. It's the only way to know for sure that everything is working fine.