Inkjet Print Head - does the printer "know" if some nozzles aren't working?

[Roberto Smith]

I was wondering if inkjet printers "know" if some of the print nozzles aren't working and if so do they compensation for it, within reason?

I have a Canon Pixma Pro 100s and change the printhead about once per year, once it becomes obvious it's past its best. I do regular nozzle checks and have noticed that there can be quite a bit of banding on the result but for day-to-day printing the quality is still good. It's only when a good number of the nozzles have failed that it becomes obvious outside of the nozzle check.

Does the printer know and compensation for lost nozzles?

 

[The Hat]

Does the printer know and compensation for lost nozzles?

The plain answer is no, that’s up to the user to detect with a simple nozzle check..

 

[thebestcpu]

I was wondering if inkjet printers "know" if some of the print nozzles aren't working and if so do they compensation for it, within reason?

I have a Canon Pixma Pro 100s and change the printhead about once per year, once it becomes obvious it's past its best. I do regular nozzle checks and have noticed that there can be quite a bit of banding on the result but for day-to-day printing the quality is still good. It's only when a good number of the nozzles have failed that it becomes obvious outside of the nozzle check.

Does the printer know and compensation for lost nozzles?

I have seen no documentation that the Canon Pixma Pro 100s has this capability.

However, Canon does have a tleast one printer that touts that capability i.e. the

imagePROGRAF PRO-300​

Here is a screenshot describing that capability (not much technical detail):

The link to that article is here: https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/imageprograf-pro-300?type=New

Most printers I am aware of require the user to perform a nozzle check to determine when to have head cleansings performed.
John Wheeler

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Epson does something like a 'nozzle verification technology'
https://blog.flextg.com/what-is-nozzle-verification-technology/

The user manual of my ET-3100X is referring to it, but I don't know if I can even see whether it's working. Detecting individual nozzles not working is the easy part, but the cleaning system does not work on nozzle level but tries to pull ink through all nozzels at the same time when the pump is running. Dececting missing droplets can easily done with the piezo elelements in the printhead which create different signals when a droplet is leaving a nozzle or not. Reading the piezo resonse directly after an ink shot was already discribed in a dissertation document from 1984 - (the link currently does not work. anymore.)