Frustrated Canon i960 owner

[rvbuilder2002]

Sorry if this is a repeat of the same old color problem questions. I spent quite a bit of time looking through the archives and the more I read the more confused I get. Hopefully someone can be of help...

The printer is about 2 years old. It worked great printing photos until about 8 months ago when all photos began having a magenta tint to them. I had always used OEM cart., but tried a cheap off brand refill kit. I know, I know...
Got rid of that stuff and went back to all new OEM carts but the problem continued. We now use refillable tanks with formulabs ink because we do lots of printing and we wanted to try and cut the cost down somewhat.

Everything we do and all software we use, is the same as it was when photos printed fine. I get the same printing results reguarless of what the photo source.. our camera, download, etc.

General printing looks great but the color balance of photos is horrible. We do all photo printing with the Canon packaged software that came with the printer.


Print head alignment is good and nozzle checks look good.
I have uninstalled the printer and then reinstalled it with no improvement.

Any suggestions whould be greatly appreciated.
I hear only good things from people printing photos with i960's
I would just like to get prints that the color looks half way normal.

Thanks in advance!

Scott

 

[johnf440]

Dump the Canon software for printing photos. It is not ICC profile aware and gives you no real control over the colors.

Do a search on here for ICC profile setting in Windows and use the windows picture wizard to do printing, for now. If the test prints show all colors printing, I would look at possible Windows color issues right now. Use the Canon profile that they include with the newest driver download, CNB5CCA0.ICM. It seems to be a pretty close match on my i960, with MIS ink and Ilford Smooth Gloss paper.

Paper choice can also affect color cast quite a bit. I'd test with the Canon stuff, either Photo Paper Pro or Glossy Photo Paper. Make sure to disable ICM in the driver after you set the ICC profile up. You can also set up color adjustment in the driver to manual and use the sliders in there to try and lose the cast. Don't be too aggresive, as it is easy to affect other colors with radical adjustments.

After installing the newest driver from the Canon website, go to control panel and into printers and faxes. Right click on the i960 and select properties. Go to the color management tab and hit the ADD button if the above mentioned profile is not there. You should be able to find it in the Colors folder that opens with the add button and then select it and hit the set as default button. Windows picture wizard should use this profile now. Look at the other ICC posts to see how to set the printer driver.

Good luck and let us know how it turns out. The 3000+ nozzle i960 printhead no likie crappy ink, like the cartridges you mentioned in your post.

 

[rvbuilder2002]

Dump the Canon software for printing photos. It is not ICC profile aware and gives you no real control over the colors.

Do a search on here for ICC profile setting in Windows and use the windows picture wizard to do printing, for now. If the test prints show all colors printing, I would look at possible Windows color issues right now. Use the Canon profile that they include with the newest driver download, CNB5CCA0.ICM. It seems to be a pretty close match on my i960, with MIS ink and Ilford Smooth Gloss paper.

Paper choice can also affect color cast quite a bit. I'd test with the Canon stuff, either Photo Paper Pro or Glossy Photo Paper. Make sure to disable ICM in the driver after you set the ICC profile up. You can also set up color adjustment in the driver to manual and use the sliders in there to try and lose the cast. Don't be too aggresive, as it is easy to affect other colors with radical adjustments.

After installing the newest driver from the Canon website, go to control panel and into printers and faxes. Right click on the i960 and select properties. Go to the color management tab and hit the ADD button if the above mentioned profile is not there. You should be able to find it in the Colors folder that opens with the add button and then select it and hit the set as default button. Windows picture wizard should use this profile now. Look at the other ICC posts to see how to set the printer driver.

Good luck and let us know how it turns out. The 3000+ nozzle i960 printhead no likie crappy ink, like the cartridges you mentioned in your post.

Thanks for your input.
I think I have discover something that is probably related to the problem.
I found some print test pages online that print a very broad pattern throughout the color pallet.
The color yellow is very faint. I did another nozzle check and yellow prints with no lines or voids but is very faint.
I always assumed that was the way it was supposed to be but apparently not.

Could yellow nozzles in the print head be partially blocked, providing streek free printing but just not applying enough ink?
I guess I need to search up teh different cleaning technics that have been used for cleaning print heads (After I figure out how to remove it).

Scott

 

[johnf440]

You may want to do some prinhead cleaning using some techniques outlined on here. I'd also make sure the contacts are clean between the printhead and carriage. I beleve a pencil eraser will do that for you and make sure the printhead is in good and tight.

 

[rbhpas]

I had similar problem w/ color shift on my i960 and traced it to very little or no yellow ink printing on the paper. Basically I think the yellow nozzles are clogged. The problem began after about a 2 month layoff on printing and that gave ink in the nozzle area plenty of time to dry and clog. I could be wrong, but this seems logical.

My i960 has been a very nice printer to use for about the past year. Speed and color are excellent. I usually use replacement ink carts from a non-oem vendor, Carrot, and have found their inks to work fine. However, the yellow ink that was in the machine at the time of the apparent clog (and at all times since the printer was purchased) was OEM so this is definitely not a problem traceable to non-OEM ink.

Right now, the print head is sitting in a dish of isopropanol in an attempt to clear up the clog and clean the head.

I had similar problems w/ an Epson (855 I think) and it was always clogging. I initially had some success with letting the print head rest on a paper towel soaked in isopropanol but eventually even this did not work any longer so I tossed the machine.

Has anyone tried saving old cartridges and filling them with isopropanol and doing an occasional cleaning using these cartridges? Or as an alternative, doing a cleaning with these cartridges before shutting down, especially if the machine will not be used for a while (I use a laser for most work)? I think, machines that use a single, multi-color print head are suspectible to clogging while the machines that use a print head integrated with the ink cartridge are far less susceptible, largely, I think, because they are replaced with each cartridge change. Problem is, IMO, that the Epsons and the Canons are quite good printers, but the clogging seems most troublesome with these machines.

Does anyone know if isopropanol, with its very low surface tension, can go thru the print head when just driven by gravity or diffusion? Or does the head actually have to operate to pump fluid from the input end out to the printing end?

Thanks in advance for any ideas or help anyone can afford.

 

[rbhpas]

I wrote yesterday about clogged nozzle in i960.

Printer working fine again. Concentrate for making Windex with Ammonia D works well. We have a gallon jug from Costco up in the closet. It mixes 1 part concentrate to six parts water to get the stuff you buy by the pint in the spray bottle. I used the concentrate right out of the bottle with no dilution. Just soaked the nozzle until ink quit coming out of the ink inlet holes at top of print head when nozzle assembly held upside down and/or with tap water running onto the nozzle face. However, before doing this, I also soaked for several hours in isopropyl alcohol (rubbing alcohol strength - meaning I used rubbing alcohol right out of the bottle). I think this did about 90% of the cleaning. I had to change the alcohol 2x since it turned black from ink or junk in the head. I figured I was getting close to clean when I ceased getting a lot of yellow coming back out of the yellow intake hole. Yellow was the color that had stopped printing completely. Getting the yellow to stop coming out took several hours after the other colors stopped coming out so there must have been a lot of dried ink in the yellow section of the head. Total time including time in both isopropanol and Windex was from about 8pm, overnight to about 10am.

Then I had to realign print head and print several pages of misc stuff. At first there were fine black lines running in direction of head travel here and there from some malfunction of apparently one black nozzle (a single tiny ink hole) - maybe some water still in the black section of the head that vaporized with different characteristics than the ink itself. This cleared itself up pretty quickly with no input from me. Then printing came out pretty weak looking (more or less true colors but pretty washed out). I think this was caused by alcohol and windex still inside the printhead that was diluting the ink. This also resolved itself in a few pix. Probably still to get a tiny bit better, but not much room for further improvement. I printed out a greeting card I had made with my son on a boat in one of the coves at Catalina Island just before sundown in August. It is very colorful with lots of warm tones, good focus and resolution. I had printed a run of these cards in November and had saved several from this run when all was working well. They were done on glossy paper and were perfect to use as a benchmark for those done today as a test. Even the paper was identical and from the same box. I cannot tell today's and November's apart so the printer appears back to normal (in other words, the usual excellent quality the i960 is known for).

For background, I looked up the invoice for the i960. It is a little over two years old, It does not get used much. Some of the ink carts are still OEM from when the printer was new. I have not bought any OEM cartridges from Canon, so this tells me how little I have used the printer.

Looking inside the machine, I noticed that the little nozzle resting sponge pad on the right was used but a second pad, on the left as I looked in from the front, appered quite saturated. Is the pad on the left for the cleaning and the one on the right for shutdown? I have seen no alarms for 'Ink bottle full or near to full.'

Head removal was simple. Once I saw how all was assembled, the head and its plastic fitment slid right out. At first, it was hard to see how things fit together and should come apart, but I used a small flashlight and that made things a lot easier. All of the adjoining parts are made of black plastic and are in a confined space. If you do not use a flashlight, it is impossible to see how things come apart. Re-assembly was a snap.

 

[Nifty]

rbhpas, what a great post!

It is so wonderful to see users who had problems come back and report on their experiences. I hope more of you people reading this do the same (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!!!)

 

[rvbuilder2002]

Well... I have learned a lot here in the past week. I haven't solved my problem 100% but I am getting there.

What I have learned-

I have learned that an ink cart. running dry is somthing you never want to let happen. While trouble shooting this problem I remembered that we had the Yellow tank get very low about 6 months ago but I never correlated that to the current problem.

I have learned that the color that appears to be causing you problems may be working perfectly, but that because of the lack (or reduced amount ) of a different color, it can appear that a particular color is being over applied.

All of our photos had a magenta hue which was actually caused by a lack of yellow.

I was unaware this was the problem because a nozzle check appeared to print fine. Turns out that even though the yellow printed with no detectable banding or other problems, it printed very light. It did not seem a lot lighter than the other five colors so I assumed the yellow just didn't look very dark as printed in a nozzle check. Wrong !!!

From now on I will save a copy of a good nozzle check for comparison.

So I have been trying a variety of the different remedies used by others for cleaning clogged nozzles.
One variation on the common soak it procedure has been to inject alcohol and windex through the yellow nozzle in the print head. I pressed a 5/8 inch long piece of soft clear vinyle tubing with !/4 inch I.D. into the end of my syringe and used it to inject cleaner through the print head. The 1/4 inch I.D. tubing is perfect size to just press over the raised portion of the ink inlet and have a good seal.

Yellow is not quite normal yet but is getting close. I will keep trying since a new print head is 2/3 the cost of what I paid for the printer two years ago.

The thing I find confusing is that the yellow has always printed with no banding or other visable problem, just very light.
Can anyone explain this? Does it mean the nozzles were all open but the flow of ink was being restricted further up within the print head?

One other question. Is there some other chemical that has been found to work better on very difficult problems? Are any of the cleaners that are advertised online any better than common chemicals available around home? Considering the cost of a print head or a new printer, I am willing to try most anything.

Thanks for everyones help.

And particularly thank you to who ever is responsible for this site!

Scott