My 5 year old 1204 has been printing fine up until a couple weeks ago. I started having black issues (not strong, vibrant black). I have suspected I needed to replace my maintenance station for a couple months due to it sounding a little weird when it was cleaning, but I had not. my nozzle check shows CMY with absolutely no issues whatsoever, the black farthest right with a few missing nozzles and the black to the left looked pretty bad. a big bunch of missing nozzles. but I could run a cleaning cycle and that channel still had a bunch of missing nozzles, but it was not the same ones. it would be in another location. so I really thought I had a damper issue (have never changed them). so today I had a tech (not the most knowlegable, but he was trying) come by and he did a couple ink fills which made the nozzle check look a lot better. then after a few minutes of sitting we did a nozzle check and it was back like it was. we then changed the two black dampers and did an ink fill and it was about like it was before we started (one channel OK, the other one pretty bad). next I changed the maintenance station and that did not really help my problem. I said all that to ask this...is it possible the dampers I used could be bad (they were not genuine mutoh), is it possible that the head is failing and just affecting one channel worse than the others (as I said, the other three colors are printing fine and the one black is acceptable)? I think I have ruled out MS, I just need to know if I should change head or am I missing something somewhere else. I dont think i have ever seen a good explanation of the symptoms of a head failing. it would be a lot easier to explain to me if it were the same nozzles everytime, but the ones firing move around which almost rules out a clogging issue in my opinion unless the clog is before the bottom of the head starving the ink. I also think if I have a capping station issue, I would see problems in another color as well. I would appreciate any opinions
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