Why oh why does my printer print greys pink?

[depps74]

I got a HP latex 315. Every now and again, basically every 2-4 months of printing about 100-150 feet per month on average my HP will start printing greys with a pinkish hue. I usually print on 3m white vinyl, or Britline white vinyl, sometimes on phototex.

Here is what I have tried:
Head cleaning, nozzle test print, force drop nozzle, manual clean.
Replaced heads with more than 12 clogged nozzles.
Calibrated, cleaned heads 5x calibrated
replaced ink, calibrated.
printed C M Y K and LIGHT C M
Usually the head swap will do the trick, but inevitably the problem always comes back, I am now at the point of cringing and warning clients that give me greys or mid tones that it might take longer than usual. Most of my heads seam to crap out after 2-3 months. This time around I noticed a new head I put in had a serial date of 2019. Maybe that is it? I know heads can only run so much ink, but do they have a shelf life too?

I do not have a color spectrometer on my HP315, and I have tried creating my own profiles. Sometimes I can limp along by lowering the magenta in Onyx's color correction but that is basically throwing darts. I am tempted to try swapping all the ink, all the heads.

Anyhow my question is this: Why does this keep happening? Is it normal for heads with less than 12 clogged nozzles to cause this? Do older dated heads go bad even if they have not been used that much?

 

[dypinc]

LIGHT C M are the ones causing most of these problems. They just have to be replaced more.

One think to try depending on how much graininess you can tolerate is use CMYK only or when you make ICC profiles you can set your GCR to use much more black which will minimize the use of lc mc inks which should allow you the achieve better gray and also allow the lc/lm head to last longer time wise.

 

[FCD]

Check your lighting, not saying this is your problem, but sometimes I'll have a gray that looks as if it has a pink hue, but after I take it outside it looks perfect. Just something to keep in mind as your lighting plays a role in how colors look.

 

[karst41]

I avoid Color Correction if possible.

 

[netsol]

not sure that is possible

 

[DeadDoc]

Daylight vs indoor is night and day difference for greys, at least in my experience. I hate my lights. Past that, check printheads?

 

[depps74]

LIGHT C M are the ones causing most of these problems. They just have to be replaced more.

One think to try depending on how much graininess you can tolerate is use CMYK only or when you make ICC profiles you can set your GCR to use much more black which will minimize the use of lc mc inks which should allow you the achieve better gray and also allow the lc/lm head to last longer time wise.

how do you set the printer and or Onyx for CMYK only? I didn't know that was possible, It kind of sounds ideal for these prints.

 

[balstestrat]

It's on the printer but you must make a new printmode and change the setting to "CMYK" during the creation of that.

 

[Bernie Morissette]

4 color greys are not easy to achieve, I recall experimenting with the recipes, or create a black only print more if possible

 

[ewded]

Latex problems, lol

 

[ChicagoGraphics]

I use to sometimes get either pink or green hues in some greys when using cmyk, then I tried just using black and the problem disapeared. As others have mentioned indoor lighting vs outdoors can be the cause of it as well

 

[Stacey K]

I created only black grays and they work pretty well for most of what I'm doing. I did gradients of 10-90% in tens.

 

[Ian Stewart-Koster]

I was having a similar problem with yellows being very non yellow, despite a head clean looking ok.
It turned out there was a tiny bit of fluff under the head, with had the actoof smearing black minutely - you could barely tell, but it deflected things..
passing macking tape , sticky side up, under the head carriage a few times cleaned the stuff out, and the problem vanished. It translated as 'dirty heads' but changing the head wasn;t a quick fix as the fluff stayed between the heads.
Sounds odd, but the masking tape cleaning fixed it for me.