Oce 460 GT Cyan Nozzle Check

[estunum]

So this morning our cyan nozzle check started to look really off. Prints with cyan look blurry, almost as if the printhead is too high, but all other colors are fine. I've cleaned it several times, swabbed it, and even ran a couple short flushes. Photos attached. The printhead itself looks fine, so visually I don't see anything.

 

[peterprintingparty]

I'm not familiar with that model, but I run a 2200 oce. Looks like you might need to change your cyan ink filter.

 

[louie]

I suggests you replace the cyan ink bag and then run the short flush procedure from tools and utilities tab. It could be a bad ink. It is a good idea to replace the ink filter as well as peter suggested.

 

[MBO_1]

So this morning our cyan nozzle check started to look really off. Prints with cyan look blurry, almost as if the printhead is too high, but all other colors are fine. I've cleaned it several times, swabbed it, and even ran a couple short flushes. Photos attached. The printhead itself looks fine, so visually I don't see anything.

Check if the printhead is at the same height like the other printheads.
It can be possible that the printhead is not at the correct position. If so you can manually put them in the correct position (dont' know how to do on 460Gt)

 

[estunum]

I asked a Canon tech and he suggested the same thing about checking the printhead being out of place. That's all he said, without actually making a service call and costing us a fortune. Visually, the printhead looks fine. Visually, it looks to be in place compared to the others. I'll have to take a closer look and take some clear photos of the printhead itself.

As to the filter, it has been a year since the last time I replaced those but it hasn't reached the 22L of ink. It's at around 16L right now. I have some here, so it would be something easy to start with.

 

[SignMeUpGraphics]

Checking head height is a good option... it doesn't take much to send it out of alignment. Only 2mm will cause the print to blur enough to be visually distinguishable.
Our tech said that if you push too hard during the suction part of the cleaning process, you can dislodge the head in an upward position and you can push it back down with a chopstick of all things.
We've never had it happen, but it did come up in passing one day during a maintenance visit.

 

[estunum]

Checking head height is a good option... it doesn't take much to send it out of alignment. Only 2mm will cause the print to blur enough to be visually distinguishable.
Our tech said that if you push too hard during the suction part of the cleaning process, you can dislodge the head in an upward position and you can push it back down with a chopstick of all things.
We've never had it happen, but it did come up in passing one day during a maintenance visit.

I wish I could fit a caliper down there because it looks to be where it should be. We will have someone look at it on Monday, but it's definitely not printing right. What is interesting is that Quality seems to be the best looking setting, still not passable, while High Definition is the worst.

This is high definition. Express, production, and fine art actually look better than this.

This is quality, by far the best but still doesn't pass.

This is just a gray print. You can see between the two prints how the cyan is just all over the place.

 

[estunum]

I'll add our resolution for future reference. Printhead was fine. Alignment wasn't perfect, but it wasn't what was causing this. It was our inks. We switched to Nazdar inks a while back and never really had an issue. Quality when down a bit, and perhaps kept degrading but we got used to it. Only switch the CMYK, kept the Oce white ink. Yesterday we made the switch to CMYK Engineering inks. Guy tweaked our profiles and quality is significantly better. The tech that was here was extremely knowledgable, set us up with auto-ordering chats and free tech support. Yesterday was a good day.