oldabelincoln
Getting Fingers Dirty
- Joined
- Feb 13, 2013
- Messages
- 6
- Reaction score
- 8
- Points
- 20
- Location
- Silicon Valley
- Printer Model
- Canon iX6520 and MX892,
I am aware that under most circumstances, Canon 5 color (CMY+photo black+pigment black) printers will use differing amounts of colors in addition to photo black when printing black in a photo. I thought I had seen the details some years ago in a Canon Service Manual for the ip4000, but no, it's not in there. And I need that info to figure out what seems to be a clogged nozzle problem.
Here's my problem.
My wife's iX6520 (225/226 inks) was in the shop with a paper jam. So she printed a flower photo with a very dark background on my MX892 (also 225/226 inks), and it came out odd looking in 2 areas of the dark background. Using the original JPG file and Paint Shop Pro's eyedropper to get color values, I determined that the dark parts that printed OK were NOT pure black in the original, but were slightly off-black in the random ways one would expect in a photo. The two fairly well defined parts of the dark background that were pure black in the original did not print OK, and these two parts printed as a rich medium purple! And I do mean purple, not magenta. If it had been magenta, I'd be looking for the green nozzle to be clogged, except there is no green ink on a 5 color Canon, and anyway, it's purple at issue, not magenta. The result was easily duplicated, so it was not a one-time glitch. And I used different programs to initiate the print, so it wasn't program-dependent. Definitely an issue with the printing process, and not the file or the program used to print the file, or the monitor (the original looks the same on two different monitors).
The inks are from Precision Color, refilled into in their carts. The paper was Costco Glossy printed as Canon Photo Pro Platinum, my wife's usual setting for that paper. Print Quality was set to High.
I'm used to weird colors from clogged nozzles, but this was a new one. What the devil is the complement of purple?
To see what was going on, I printed with unchanged settings using plain paper and got an identical result - not some sort of issue with the paper itself, then. Eventually with different settings, I found that if I used anything (or at least the decent subset of anything that I tried) other than a Photo Pro Platinum paper setting, the problem went away. That told me that the particular way that the printer prints pure black on Photo Paper Platinum setting has something to do with it, and presumably that is the mix of inks used to make pure black under the circumstances.
Just to tie this all up, my wife's iX6520 is now back from the shop, working OK, and using the settings that started all this, produced a perfect print, underlining that my MX892 is the issue, presumably a clogged nozzle(s?).
Does anyone have either a solid idea about how purple came about, or at least the details of which inks were most likely used to print pure black under the circumstances?
Here's my problem.
My wife's iX6520 (225/226 inks) was in the shop with a paper jam. So she printed a flower photo with a very dark background on my MX892 (also 225/226 inks), and it came out odd looking in 2 areas of the dark background. Using the original JPG file and Paint Shop Pro's eyedropper to get color values, I determined that the dark parts that printed OK were NOT pure black in the original, but were slightly off-black in the random ways one would expect in a photo. The two fairly well defined parts of the dark background that were pure black in the original did not print OK, and these two parts printed as a rich medium purple! And I do mean purple, not magenta. If it had been magenta, I'd be looking for the green nozzle to be clogged, except there is no green ink on a 5 color Canon, and anyway, it's purple at issue, not magenta. The result was easily duplicated, so it was not a one-time glitch. And I used different programs to initiate the print, so it wasn't program-dependent. Definitely an issue with the printing process, and not the file or the program used to print the file, or the monitor (the original looks the same on two different monitors).
The inks are from Precision Color, refilled into in their carts. The paper was Costco Glossy printed as Canon Photo Pro Platinum, my wife's usual setting for that paper. Print Quality was set to High.
I'm used to weird colors from clogged nozzles, but this was a new one. What the devil is the complement of purple?
To see what was going on, I printed with unchanged settings using plain paper and got an identical result - not some sort of issue with the paper itself, then. Eventually with different settings, I found that if I used anything (or at least the decent subset of anything that I tried) other than a Photo Pro Platinum paper setting, the problem went away. That told me that the particular way that the printer prints pure black on Photo Paper Platinum setting has something to do with it, and presumably that is the mix of inks used to make pure black under the circumstances.
Just to tie this all up, my wife's iX6520 is now back from the shop, working OK, and using the settings that started all this, produced a perfect print, underlining that my MX892 is the issue, presumably a clogged nozzle(s?).
Does anyone have either a solid idea about how purple came about, or at least the details of which inks were most likely used to print pure black under the circumstances?