Magenta printing super light VJ 1204 (2 yrs + old)

[os101king]

Problem cropped up Friday. Magenta is printing super light. Run many cleaning cycles, total maintenance this morning and 2 STRONG cleaning cycles and if I set a circle to print at 100% magenta it comes out orange. Everything else is running fine and there are no breaks in the nozzle check of any of the colors, including M. It is, however, super light in color. Hadn't gotten an error until this morning, lemme check this first before completing the post.

Searched quite a bit.. so far nothing identical posted. Nothing but regular maintenance has been done... could this be a "damper" issue? It's printing when I do the nozzle check, with no dropouts just very light... could the damper get clogged from impurities in the ink itself?

Ok, so to re-cap. Friday Magenta stopped printing correctly. Head cleanings and the like performed but no improvement. Cartridge has ink left in it, and no dropouts when doing nozzle checks. I printed a sample panel with y=100, m=100, y=50/m=50 and m=100/y=100. The yellow circle is fine, but the 50/50 is light orange and the 100/100 is a deeper orange.

Going to print samples of the other pure colors to check, but so far it looks to be magenta causing the problem.

Any suggestions/comments would be greatly appreciated.

 

[randya]

Check the end of the ink cartidge where it plugs into the printer.

There should be a little circle with an M in it for magenta.

 

[ChicagoGraphics]

Are you running 4 or 6 colours?

 

[P Wagner]

My guess is that the ink cart may be mis-labeled and actually contains Light Magenta rather than Magenta ink.

Bob

 

[os101king]

Running 4. The magenta was printing magenta up until Friday. It was/is definitely a Magenta. The tech where i bought my setup told me of the "printer not recognizing a cart out of ink" explanation as where to start. Had me insert a new magenta and start printing a 4" block of spot color to clear it out. He said the negative pressure created by the lack of ink in the cart might have drawn another ink into the channel (my magenta is printing orange). So I ran the block, and wound up with a nice deep orange. I'm going to run a clear-out print like this on yellow and cyan as well, since they seemed to be mixed up in this mess (cyan is teal...). Next call coming up, I'll update after that next bit of advice. Hopefully it's something more than "let me get my $200 an hour guy out there". Running one more spot magenta block to be sure....

Wish me luck.

 

[os101king]

My guess is that the ink cart may be mis-labeled and actually contains Light Magenta rather than Magenta ink.

Bob

"Light Magenta" is orange? That's odd. Sorry but I don't think you'd read my post fully. The magenta is printing orange. Yellow is printing yellow, but Magenta is printing out orange. Was instructed to go into the "cleaning" menu and then hit the up arrow to select "LittleCharge". I ran that, and am about to run another magenta block. The explanation was that the printer may have drawn so much yellow in it contaminated the tank. This is eating my ink carts up, but better that than a tech visit.

Ok, the little charge seemed to do the trick. Lesson here, if a light ink condition persists and you suspect the cartridge, replace it immediately before too many cleanings. If I had pulled the magenta after the first couple bad prints, it wouldn't have drawn that much yellow into the machine and wouldn't have screwed the colors so bad. Printing a block of each spot right now to verify that I'm five by five.


.... and we're back. Up and running!!! First major issue after TWO YEARS!!!!! I'm not doing a victory dance, and in fact I turned my monitor away from the printer so it couldn't read this. Just went outta warranty two months ago... don't want to tempt fate.

Now for the official...


..> WOOOO HOOO!!! <....