Scitex FB550 printing too dark

[Blynn]

My 3 year old Scitex just had drop out issues on the cyan head. During a large job (mostly blue) we struggled with attempting to print by purging between drop out before giving up! During that we noticed the colors started printing incorrectly.
We've replaced the Thermistor assembly in hopes to resolve the print issue, but are still printing wrong colors... Too Dark, and Too Blue.

Anyone have experience with this? I've the better part of a day running calibrations and print tests.

Thanks!

 

[ikarasu]

Do you shake your ink boxes? And is one... likely the blue running low?

We had an issue where blue dropped out on us... Then all of a sudden everything blue turned purple. It turned out the printer sucked up some of the bottom, unshakened ink, and the color was off... Doing purges wont fix, We put a brand new box of ink in and it didn't help... because theres quite a bit of ink in the line, you have to get it to purge all the ink, which a normal cleaning wont do.

Our tech suggested we tell it to do a printhead replacement... That will suck all the ink out of the head and out of the lines and re-fill it with new ink.

Keep in mind this uses about 5% of your ink for each head you tell it to replace... so it's not cheap, but if you don't shake your ink every other week... or you're using expired ink, it may be worth a shot, at least on the cyan head you're having problems with.

 

[ikarasu]

Also to note... If you do do a "Replacement" and re-fill the ink lines... Don't worry if half your nozzles go missing, thats just air in the line... doing a few purges and printing a few ft fixes it. It scared the crap out of me when I did it and half of them were missing... I thought I broke the head by doing something wrong. Took about 2 cleanings and everything was 100% again.