Hi,
I have one of the above printers which has been standing with no use for
about a year. I tried to use it and to my surprise the picture it printed
was 80% ok. I replaced all the cartridges but it still printed out exactly
the same ie the darker parts of the picture were 'snowy' sort of white
fluffy blobs.
I used the clean & deep clean facilities but still no joy.
Could someone help please.
Thanks
You can manually clean the printhead. The caveat is that the process
can damage the printhead, and a new printhead is something like $100
(occasionally showing up online for $50), so you have to decide if
it's worth taking the risk.
Remove the printhead from the printer, and take the cartridges out.
You'll have to figure out what to do with them yourself. I would
recommend against putting them all in a margerine tub. It's what I
did, and the result was that some of the ink leaked, and cross
contaminated the colour cartridges -- had to toss them, as my yellow
cartridge became a greenish brown.
First, soak a paper towel (one of those high absorbency ones on a
roll, not the newsprint type used in restaurants, malls, and schools)
using distilled or deionized water. Deionized water is what you get
when you pass water through a Brita type filter, by the way. Use this
to wipe off as much of congealed ink from the bottom face of the
printhead as you can.
Next, take another paper towel and fold it into a sort of pad. Moisten
it and put it in a flat dish of some sort. Put the printhead with the
bottom face down on this moistened pad and leave it overnight. In the
morning you should have a rainbow coloured mess, as the congealed
residue is dissolved by the water and pulled out by capillary action
into the pad.
Dry it off, reinstall the cartridges and try again. The technique
usually works, but not always.
A variation of this uses Ammonia based window cleaner (windex or
"normal" windshield washer fluid) instead of deionized water. It may
be more effective in dissolving the ink clots. The drawback is that
the ammonia solution is slightly corrosive, as it has ionic components
(that's why I suggested using deionized water rather than tap water).
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Typically, inkjets don't store well, but if you know you need to store
it for a long while (2 months or longer), the printhead and cartridges
should be removed. The printhead and cartridges should then be stored
separately in ziplock type bags. Not sure if it's necessary to do a
manual cleaning of a printhead before storage. Some claim it's
necessary, some don't.
