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
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