Printhead printing blurry

[Lelle]

Hey guys! I'm a new member of this forum, i have seen you post a lot helpful comments and great ideas of how to fix roland printers. The case is that i my XC-540 has started printing blurry. Printhead seems to be in a great shape excepted for the yellow one which has some reflected nozzles. When i print cyan or a combination of it it leaves small drops on the sides of the print. I have tried to clean the encoder stripe but it didn't work, then i flipped the encoder did a linear calibration and nothing changed i'm about to buy a new encoder strip just in case i replaced the encoder in a bad way because i'm relative new at doing technical service to my machine. I tried to print in uni-dir and theres blurry only in one side of the print and when i print the design in high speed 360x540 (i think it is) it leaves no blur. I went in to service mode and realize that the problem is the light cyan print head as you can see, its almost impossible to calibrate the bi-dir and horizontal when you can't see vertical and horizontal lines.
What does DT1 and DT3 means? Its a separation of the head? DT1 low and hight light cyan seems to be ok but DT3 low and hight are not good. I attached some pictures so you can see and give me some ideas!

Thanks!!!

 

[Solventinkjet]

Your light cyan head is fried. Notice how it prints fuzzy only on the DT3 alignment prints? That is a tell tail sign of an electronically failing print head. It's easier for the print head to fire the large dot size but the failure comes into view when it tries to print the smaller dots. That is what is causing the mist. If you want to get by for now you can just change your profile settings to not use variable dot and manually select DT1. That will get rid of the spray but the head will eventually completely fail.

 

[Lelle]

Thanks for a quick reply Vander J! So the best thing is to replace the light cyan head? or can i do something else?

 

[Solventinkjet]

Unfortunately with this failure it is not really fixable. I have seen some people have limited success with taking the head out, flushing it out completely and then submerging it in 90% alcohol for about half an hour. Then they let it dry and re-install. It's a lot of work for something that most likely won't change anything.

 

[Lelle]

Ouuuch that hurts! I thought it was a way to get it fixed. I maybe should try the flushing you telling me about, i got nothing to loose. I bought the printer from a Swedish company and we shipped it out by sea, it took 2 months for it to arrive. They did all service before shipping (dumpers, cap tops, printheads) The testprint looked good except the yellow one which has some deflected nozzles but the print quality looked good until i got the problem with the light cyan printhead. So my question is how did the light cyan printhead got so badly and if there is some way to avoid it happen again.

Thanks a lot!