I'm going crazy trying to fix this VERY ODD problem!

[Nifty]

I did some printing and noticed a few lines in my print. No big deal, I'll just go through my standard regiment of nozzle cleaning, changing carts, etc. etc. etc.

Well, after everything I tried, even a new Canon cartridge, I'm still having an odd problem. For example, I print the following test page:

No matter how many times I print it, or when I do cleaning cycles I get the same lines at the bottom of the page like this:

http://www.nifty-stuff.com/img/files/lines.JPG

The lines are almost always the same spacing and size. I can print this image and it comes out fine every time:
http://www.nifty-stuff.com/gallery/sample-images/PDI_Target

I wrote it off as an anomaly with the photo or that my PC needed a reboot.

Well, just a few minutes ago I printed a bunch of pictures and out of the 10 pictures two keep giving me lines. It always seems to be an issue with yellow and always on the same images.

Any suggestions?

 

[Scrubking]

I would suggest thoroughly cleaning the print head - don't just hit it with air, clean it with alcohol and remove ALL ink from the head and let it dry. Also clean the connections on the back. Also try soaking it if it still doesn't work.

To me it seems like a nozzle is partially plugged and when the right conditions arise it won't print correctly.

 

[Grandad35]

Nifty-stuff,

I separated out the individual color channels from your print. The cyan and black channels were perfect, and the magenta channel was slightly darker at the lines, but not a lot. They yellow channel showed that there was no yellow in the lines.

Can you give some idea of the scale on this image? What is the spacing between the lines? Does this spacing match the distance that the paper advances for each pass of the print head?

On my i9900, the paper stops advancing for the last several print head passes, more when printing borderless. Is this when the problem appears? Is it possible that this print uses so much yellow that some of the nozzles in the print head are being starved for part of the head movement (note that alternate lines start on opposite sides of the print)?

 

[tyamada]

What program are you printing with, try another program with the same picture and see if the problem persists.

 

[Nifty]

Well, after trying a bunch of other things I decided to try a third cartridge and it seems that things are running fine now.

I started to really rule out a cartridge / nozzle issue because I would print a full page of yellow and everything was fine. I'd print the image above and get lines in almost the same place, but would print (what I thought to be) an equally colorful image with as much yellow and it printed fine. This kind of stuff makes troubleshooting a wee bit more difficult!

 

[Nifty]

Grandad,

That's a great idea... to remove the color elements in a photo using software. Maybe I'll create an image reference that will help me avoid problems like this in the future. Maybe a few different versions of the same photo by removing a color from each image.