printing wrong colour issue

[jayney1961]

I have a canon i470D printer. It has been printing fine up until today. The problem I am having is that the cyan colour is printing magenta. The other colours are fine.

 

[ghwellsjr]

Why don't you just buy another new OEM ink cartridge?

 

[jayney1961]

I wll buy another cartridge if there is not a problem with the printer. If it is a cleaning issue then I will do a clean. The cartridge is almost full so I don't want to do a clean if that isn't going to make any difference. And I don't want to buy another one if that is going to be the same.
Basically, is it a printer problem, cleaning issue or cartridge problem?

 

[ghwellsjr]

The only way to know if it is a printer problem or a cleaning problem or a cartridge problem is to try each solution one at a time. I just assumed that since you have a cartridge with three colors, you can easily determine if that is the problem by replacing it. However, the problem could be electrical in the print head or in the printer but those are less easily replaceable and not likely.

One other thing you could try is to remove the ink cartridge and blot some ink from each of the three outlet ports and see what colors you get. If you don't see an uncontaminated cyan, magenta, and yellow then the problem would be contamination in the ink cartridge which you will need to replace but you will also need to do cleaning cycles to purge out the wrong colors in the print head.

Problems like this can happen when the printer sits idle for many weeks and ink seeps out of the print head onto the purge pad where the print head parks and then soaks up into some of the nozzles of other colors. You have nothing to lose by doing cleaning cycles, in fact, I had assumed that you had already tried things like that before posting.