Ink Jet Help Requested

[xrunner]

Thanks for the update! By any chance, did you in the past allow the cartridge to actually run dry, and then leave it dry for a while? That's the only thing I'm aware of that can really cause a clog in a Canon. That's why they warn when the cartridge is running low (though I really appreciate that the Canons let you override the low-ink warning and keep printing if you choose.)

Well, I've had the thing for over 5 years (or more), so can I definitively state I never let it go dry? No, I cannot so we'll assume I have. 

I'm going to Google a good color test print image and I'll make sure to print it out at least once a month (or more).

Edit: Additionally, I got a supply of ink carts to use up, but I think after they are gone I'll switch to a color laser ...

[tooki]

Printing anything once a month should be enough, as the color nozzles are cleaned even before printing a black only document, as I already said above.

[Brumby]

Just a curiosity question .... I have a Canon PRO-100 (affordable A3 capability) that gets used infrequently, but I have seen the ink levels go down with alarming speed from, I suspect, the extended song and dance it does when powered on each time.

Does anyone have ideas on whether there is less ink wasted with this if the printer is left on or not?

I am interested in any observations that people can offer - but if anyone wants a reference point, assume 1 A4 page printed per day with half page of colour graphics and half page of text.

[Ampera]

0 ink is wasted on ribbon printers

ever.

Seriously, it doesn't do any bullshit, it just spins the ribbon and strikes it against the paper.

[tooki]

Just a curiosity question .... I have a Canon PRO-100 (affordable A3 capability) that gets used infrequently, but I have seen the ink levels go down with alarming speed from, I suspect, the extended song and dance it does when powered on each time.

Does anyone have ideas on whether there is less ink wasted with this if the printer is left on or not?

I am interested in any observations that people can offer - but if anyone wants a reference point, assume 1 A4 page printed per day with half page of colour graphics and half page of text.

No, as long as it is left plugged in, it remembers how long it's been since the last use whether turned on or not, and decides how deep a cleaning to do depending on the interval. If, however, you actually disconnect AC power, it doesn't know how long it's been, and it will default to a deeper cleaning.

Leaving it on uses slightly more power just to keep the ports on. I keep mine plugged in but off, simply because the power light is annoyingly bright in my bedroom. Otherwise I'd leave it on.

Many Canon inkjets have an intermediate mode, auto power on, which turns the printer "off" but keeps the USB port awake, and turns the machine on automatically. I'm not even sure whether mine has that or not, since I connect via Ethernet, which doesn't have wake-on-LAN.

[tooki]

0 ink is wasted on ribbon printers

ever.

Seriously, it doesn't do any bullshit, it just spins the ribbon and strikes it against the paper.

True, but when's the last time you saw a photo capable printer that uses ribbons? (Last I ever saw was the Alps dye-sublimation-ribbon printers from the mid 90s. They SLO's had thermal wax transfer ribbons, including metal foil, which was a unique capability.)

[Brumby]

No, as long as it is left plugged in, it remembers how long it's been since the last use whether turned on or not, and decides how deep a cleaning to do depending on the interval. If, however, you actually disconnect AC power, it doesn't know how long it's been, and it will default to a deeper cleaning.

Well, AC power is connected all the time - unless there has been a blackout (which we have had a couple of).  Still, there hasn't been that many instances to cause a noticeable difference.

I would like to think someone could come up with an ink solution that didn't suffer from this problem - but, then, the ink revenue would dry up too - wouldn't it?

[Ampera]

0 ink is wasted on ribbon printers

ever.

Seriously, it doesn't do any bullshit, it just spins the ribbon and strikes it against the paper.

True, but when's the last time you saw a photo capable printer that uses ribbons? (Last I ever saw was the Alps dye-sublimation-ribbon printers from the mid 90s. They SLO's had thermal wax transfer ribbons, including metal foil, which was a unique capability.)

My dot matrix impact printer uses ribbons and can print in full greyscale bit mapping over it's own drivers, or even the ESC/P and ESC/P2 communication standards. There are also colour dot matrix impact printers that use ribbons, and if you can find a good quality one, they will do full colour pictures no problem.

[tooki]

No, as long as it is left plugged in, it remembers how long it's been since the last use whether turned on or not, and decides how deep a cleaning to do depending on the interval. If, however, you actually disconnect AC power, it doesn't know how long it's been, and it will default to a deeper cleaning.

Well, AC power is connected all the time - unless there has been a blackout (which we have had a couple of).  Still, there hasn't been that many instances to cause a noticeable difference.

I would like to think someone could come up with an ink solution that didn't suffer from this problem - but, then, the ink revenue would dry up too - wouldn't it?

I think that from a technical standpoint, using ink as a cleaning medium is not a bad approach. I don't think anyone would mind wasting ink on cleaning if it didn't cost as much as vintage single malt.

I wanna say that some industrial inkjets have separate cleaning solvents, but I'm not at all confident on this point.

I think ink formulations are an ongoing vexing problem in any printing context. Every inkjet ink needs to have the right density, viscosity, etc for the printhead and print medium used.  Bubble jet (Canon, HP) requires some form of volatile solvent in the ink that boils in a controlled fashion in the nozzle to propel the ink out, while not drying out and clogging. Piezo inkjet (Epson, most industrial inkjets) is far more flexible in terms of ink formulation since it needn't boil the ink, but the print heads are costlier to make, and I believe they're pickier in terms of air bubbles getting in the ink tubing. Presumably when using non-water-soluble inks, like varnishes, it becomes critical to not let ink dry on the head, or you're left with an unclearable clog. (I suspect that's what the problem was in older epsons: the ink, once dried, wasn't able to be dissolved by the ink in the nozzles.)

One cool approach in industrial inkjets is using UV-curable lacquers, so the ink really won't dry on its own, and then the printed object is just UV-exposed after the ink is applied.

[tooki]

0 ink is wasted on ribbon printers

ever.

Seriously, it doesn't do any bullshit, it just spins the ribbon and strikes it against the paper.

True, but when's the last time you saw a photo capable printer that uses ribbons? (Last I ever saw was the Alps dye-sublimation-ribbon printers from the mid 90s. They SLO's had thermal wax transfer ribbons, including metal foil, which was a unique capability.)

My dot matrix impact printer uses ribbons and can print in full greyscale bit mapping over it's own drivers, or even the ESC/P and ESC/P2 communication standards. There are also colour dot matrix impact printers that use ribbons, and if you can find a good quality one, they will do full colour pictures no problem.

I know, but I did say "photo capable", as in, capable of producing something photo-quality. No dot matrix printer can come even distantly close to that, even if graphics-capable.

[stj]

there is a printer type that can have good images without liquids,
wax printers use pellets that they melt.
tektronix phasor was a name i seem to remember.
severly expensive though - even used at auctions they went for huge amounts.

[tooki]

there is a printer type that can have good images without liquids,
wax printers use pellets that they melt.
tektronix phasor was a name i seem to remember.
severly expensive though - even used at auctions they went for huge amounts.

Actually, those were under a thousand bucks new by the time Xerox discontinued them, which was only in the past year or two.

They used wax blocks (not pellets). They were fast, but you did not want to turn them off: the heating and cleaning cycle used tremendous amounts of ink (on the order of 5% of an ink block!!!). Their print quality was eclipsed by the best color lasers by around 2001, and by the late aughts, cheap color lasers marched them in quality and undercut them substantially in price. I'm actually surprised they lasted as long as they did.

FYI, they were invented by tektronix, which called all its color printer products "Phaser". They sold their printer division to Xerox, who continues the Phaser name for its laser printers to this day. They changed the solid ink printers' name to ColorQube for the final few years of the technology's life.

[SeanB]

Got one in the garage, tossed out because of the consumable price. Used 3 of each block per month ( black was free as well, and if you asked for more it was free with the next order, so I always printed as white or other colour text on a black background) even in standby, and half a block per start up cycle in cleaning the ink reservoir and piezo print heads. At $100 per colour per month it was crazy expensive to run, though i did make some black candles from the wax blocks.

[Brumby]

I picked up a dye sublimation printer many years ago.  It had an uneven printing problem that I was going to have a look at - but the price of the consumables put me off.  Eventually, it found its way to an e-waste collection along with 100kg or so of other obsolete gear.

[tooki]

Got one in the garage, tossed out because of the consumable price. Used 3 of each block per month ( black was free as well, and if you asked for more it was free with the next order, so I always printed as white or other colour text on a black background) even in standby, and half a block per start up cycle in cleaning the ink reservoir and piezo print heads. At $100 per colour per month it was crazy expensive to run, though i did make some black candles from the wax blocks.

Yep. They excelled at high-volume office printing, but were terrible for sporadic use.

"Even in standby" -- well I think that's the thing. If you let them go into standby, then they'd have to reheat and purge when waking up. They really worked best when kept fully on at all times, which only makes sense in high volume environments. (Many Xerox models default to "smart" standby, where it learns the customer's typical usage patterns and then automatically sleeps and wakes for them. But in these, it can be... suboptimal.)

[tooki]

I picked up a dye sublimation printer many years ago.  It had an uneven printing problem that I was going to have a look at - but the price of the consumables put me off.  Eventually, it found its way to an e-waste collection along with 100kg or so of other obsolete gear.

Dye-sub was awesome for its time (and still is for certain applications), but for the most part, it's amazing how inkjet (for photos) and laser (for graphic design/DTP) totally displaced it. I mean, looking at the earliest inkjets (like the HP ThinkJet) and the ones in the early 90s, who would ever have guessed that inkjet would become the highest-quality printing technology for so many color applications? They've gone from sorry-i-can't-afford-a-laser-so-i-have-to-settle-for-this to actually exceeding laser for photos and graphics, being roughly equivalent for text (except on cheap paper where B&W laser still excels), matching dye-sub for photo prints, but also expanding into areas I never would have predicted, like bulk invoice printing, cash register receipts, and large-format printing like billboards, banners, posters, and blueprints.

[stj]

inkjet gave rise to customer abuse.
i had what i consider the best inkjet,
canon BJ330
black&white (well just black) A4 with tractor-feed.
AND the ink cartridge also contained the waste pad - looked like an 8-track tape.

no waste box in the printer, no chip in the cartridge, no automatic cleaning to waste the ink.

and then came HP & Epson to destroy the fun.
eeproms, heads on cartridges etc.

[tooki]

inkjet gave rise to customer abuse.

Oh please, that's absurd. The razor-and-blades model was well established by then, having been introduced decades ago by, you guessed it, Gillette.

i had what i consider the best inkjet,
canon BJ330
black&white (well just black) A4 with tractor-feed.
AND the ink cartridge also contained the waste pad - looked like an 8-track tape.

no waste box in the printer, no chip in the cartridge, no automatic cleaning to waste the ink.

Waste recepticle in the ink tank is a cool idea. For the low print volumes in consumer models, though, it just doesn't make sense to add the machine complexity of that, given that almost nobody actually fills the spittoon.

That printer most certainly does consume ink in automatic cleaning -- that it doesn't was such an absurd claim that I looked up the service manual, and it says that the cleaning function (which wipes the head and then "fills the nozzles with fresh ink") "is automatically performed when the power is switched on, before printing starts, or when printing starts after 24 hours or more". Moreover, it has the "maintenance jet function that ejects ink from all the nozzles of the bubble jet head to ... prevent the nozzles clogging", which "automatically operates when turn [sic] on the printer, before printing starts, every 12 to 30 seconds during printing, or every 1 hour for 24 hours after power on."

So yeah, it's using ink for cleaning, just like every inkjet.

and then came HP & Epson to destroy the fun.
eeproms, heads on cartridges etc.

Many, many early inkjets used integrated heads in the cartridges, including the HP ThinkJet (the first commercial desktop inkjet, 1984), Canon BJ-10 series, BJ-200 series, etc. Canon and HP now both use integrated heads in their cheapest printers, and permanent or semi-permanent heads in higher-end models.

Epson inkjets have never used integrated heads, and like most printers had no chips in the ink tanks until the 2000s.

Why did ink cartridges get more and more expensive over the years? Because the printers got cheaper and cheaper. In the end, you're paying a similar amount of money over the life of the printer. The same thing has happened to laser. And as always, very expensive printers with cheap consumables do exist for users with high print volumes.

[SeanB]

I picked up a dye sublimation printer many years ago.  It had an uneven printing problem that I was going to have a look at - but the price of the consumables put me off.  Eventually, it found its way to an e-waste collection along with 100kg or so of other obsolete gear.

Dye-sub was awesome for its time (and still is for certain applications), but for the most part, it's amazing how inkjet (for photos) and laser (for graphic design/DTP) totally displaced it. I mean, looking at the earliest inkjets (like the HP ThinkJet) and the ones in the early 90s, who would ever have guessed that inkjet would become the highest-quality printing technology for so many color applications? They've gone from sorry-i-can't-afford-a-laser-so-i-have-to-settle-for-this to actually exceeding laser for photos and graphics, being roughly equivalent for text (except on cheap paper where B&W laser still excels), matching dye-sub for photo prints, but also expanding into areas I never would have predicted, like bulk invoice printing, cash register receipts, and large-format printing like billboards, banners, posters, and blueprints.

I have an old Sony Dye sublimation photo printer, along with a load of the dye film cartridges and photo paper for it. Of course, being Sony, it uses a Sony Memory stick as input source, or a paused TV frame, as it uses a regular TV set as a display for the menu, and has a very s______l_______o_____w processor on board, for driving the on screen display and driving the thermal print head that will eventually, after 4 passes of the paper through the machine, print a pretty decent full colour photo as output.

[stj]

memory-stick is no problem, you can get an sd-card adapter.

[SeanB]

memory-stick is no problem, you can get an sd-card adapter.

I bought a Sony camera on gumtree instead, it came with a few MS cards, and even had a pair of Duracell lithiums in it that were near new, and cost less than the adaptor online as well. Was good to add extra ones to the 8M one I had, plus I gave some to the nephews to use on the Playstation as game storage. I even have a sony optical mouse that has an integrated MS reader in it, though the grey case really needs a retrobrite, which would destroy the screenprinted logos on it.

[tooki]

Are you sure it will damage the printing? I've seen many people use retrobrite on vintage Macs that have silkscreened (or actually likely pad printed) model names on them.