PrinterHelp

Print Quality

Print quality:

There is more to getting good quality prints than putting some ink cartridges in the printer and grabbing a handful of paper. This is particularly important when printing photos. Manufacturers recommend that you use their original ink, that you use their brand of paper, or other recommended paper, and that you use the correct paper settings in the printer driver.

Now what does the last item mean?

(Find Paper Settings for your printer)

If you explore the settings in your printer driver (Start/Printers and faxes/right click on the relevant icon, find Properties). Somewhere in here under preferences, page Setup or suchlike you should find the paper settings, typically with a drop-down list of “Plain paper” followed by a lot of other varieties from the manufacturer’s recommended paper list.

If you don’t, or can’t, select the paper you are actually using, the print profile applied to the paper will be wrong and the results will be poor. Don’t assume that it doesn’t really matter – it does, and if you use the wrong kind of paper the results can look awful ( full of banding).

Horror story:

Customer got hold of some postcard-sized blanks intended for a wax-process portable photo printer, and tried to use them in an inkjet portable photo printer. Result: the ink would not dry, ran and smeared everywhere, and the printer had to be partly dismantled and cleaned.

That’s not all that can go wrong. Customers printing out large prints in an A4 or A3 borderless format complained bitterly that while most of the print was OK there was banding across the trailing inch. (They could have been even angrier if they had calculated the true cost of the bad prints.) To cut a long story short, the manufacturer said that the fault, which evidently occurred when the paper changed speed as it escaped from the main rollers and was expelled by the exit rollers, was minimised by using their recommended ink and paper and the correct paper profile settings. Which was largely true.

If the colour balance of the photo is clearly wrong, first perform a nozzle test

(typically launched from the printer Properties)

This should show if any nozzle group is missing or not printing fully (it helps if you know what a good pattern looks like)

Colour missing:

Check that ink tanks physically contain ink (ignore on-screen displays).

Perform head cleaning.

Colours wrong:

Check that ink tanks are in correct positions.

Discard cheap inks and fit the manufacturer\’s recommended inks.

Check that inks are of the correct type. Do NOT replace regular colours by “photo” colours just because you think this is a good idea. In some manufacturer’s systems the “photo” is a lighter colour used to give greater colour gamut in a 6-ink printer, and if you use a “photo” in a 4-ink printer, all you will achieve is to give your prints a severe hue error! This error turned up in the workshops surprisingly often.

So, if the print colour is wrong, it is usually an operator error of some sort.

If the head is partly blocked, one would suspect the customer’s choice of ink brand.

Of course it could be that the head is really faulty. It does occasionally happen even if original manufacturer’s inks are used. One sneaky head fault occasionally encountered was that a colour prints too pale - the colour bar in the nozzle test print looks perfectly formed but is actually too pale! This also occurs if an ink tank is running out.

Ink tank empty?

*Don’t pay much heed to the on-screen display. (See post - How does the on-screen ink level work?)

*Remove the tank from the printer. Can you see the ink level through transparent sides?

*If you can’t see the ink level through transparent sides, its weight might give a clue.

*Find a clean sheet of scrap paper, put it on a table and whack the paper smartly with the outlet end of the ink tank (plain tanks only, not the sort that include the print nozzles). IF the tank contains usable ink, a spatter of ink will appear on the paper, or, of it is a tri-colour tank, three spatter marks.