Printing w/ missing cartridge(s)

[ForestCat]

Hi all, excellent forum.
I'm a noob here, 1st post. A little background:

S900, using refilled (by me) oem cartridges. Started to notice major color problems recently, basically grayscales were all "brownscales". Nozzle checks looked to me like I somehow got cross contamination. Trying to troubleshhoot it, but I have a couple of basic (stupid?) questions.

I know certain printheads can be damaged if they are run dry, as they are ink-cooled, etc. My S900 will print with only the black cart installed, no complaints from either the printer or the driver.
My plan was to run all the ink out of everything downstream of the cartridges, and then see if I get true grayscales with just the black cartridge, and work my way back to six cartridges. I know it will use a lot of ink, & require light cleanings to "prime" the system again. Is this a stupid idea? Can the printer be damaged running it without cartridges? Is there a better way? The cartridges don't look contaminated to my eye, but its hard to tell objectively. Thanks for any insight.

--=ForestCat==--

 

[drc023]

Have you checked the option for grayscale printing on the driver? It wouldn't be a good idea to run without ink for each color. The risk of damage is too high. Go back through other topics in this forum for print head cleaning procedures. You also may have an ink flow problem caused by ink cartridges which have outlived their usefulness. Could you post a scan of the nozzle checks.

 

[ForestCat]

Here's an update: Prior to my previous post, I had removed all the cartridges except black, and proceeded to print out a 4"x4" solid black square in photoshop. My thought process was that solid black wouldn't cause the other heads to fire much if at all. Did this four times, each printout succesively more "black". I then took the risk of printing out some small color bars I got off the Hutcheson site. I expected to see only shades of grey, but I was surprised to see slight color. I suppose there was still some color ink left in the heads, etc. At this point, I asked for advice here on the possibility of damaging the heads, because I would have needed to print these color bars a few times to get them all "grey". I thought it would be prudent to put the cartdridges back in until I got an answer, to prevent anything from really drying out. I got restless after a couple of hours. I ran 2 normal cleanings & nozzle checks and then tried to print the rgb explorer pattern from Hutcheson.

The color is SPOT ON. It looks better than its looked in a year. I can't recommend this procedure until the jury is in on printing without carts/head damage, but the problem seems fixed. I didn't do anything to the color cartridges other than to set them aside while running the "black purge". Nothing leaked out of them, etc. If anyone is interested, I can post some before & after scans.

I got so psyched that I ordered an it8 target so I can create a profile for my s900/8400f & my new Hyundai L72S LCD, which came with its own ICM profile. Now I remember why I bought this printer! ;-)

 

[Nifty]

I've wondered about something along these lines before. Let's say someone has a printer with a printhead where 1 or more colors are "plugged". Could they pull the color carts and just print everything in grayscale using the black cartridge? It would be nice to be able to individually turn off and on all of the individual colors / nozzles.

I guess if I was in this situation I'd just fill some cartridges with cleaning solution instead of leaving them out of the printer and print everything in grayscale. Worst case, nothing changes, but maybe I'd end up with some working nozzles.