Light Banding with my Continuous Ink Supply System
The inexpensive CISS on my Epson 1400 worked perfectly all spring, summer, and early fall, then I noticed light magenta and cyan banding in gray areas on my photos. Thinking I had clogged print heads, I did a nozzle check. The Nozzle check was fine. Plain paper color prints, were fine, but still I had that banding. Ran a few cleaning cycles, but that seemed to make it worse. I read web comments about similar problems others had with their CISS. No one had a solution. I started cussing the thing, like other’s I concluded that CISS were useless junk.
Then I noticed that three was ink in the air filters on the supply tanks. I removed them, took them apart, cleaned them, put them back together and reinstalled them. After I did a couple of cleaning cycles and the problem was gone. Apparently, what was happening was with the filters clogged there was not enough air flow. It seems that that caused a partial vacuum in the tanks that actually was pulling ink back from the ink cartridges. It was OK if all I was printing was a nozzle check or a draft document, but when I tried printing photos, it restricted the flow of ink to the heads.
I ordered some new filters from a guy on eBay, but before they arrived, the problem was back. The filters were clogged with ink again. Why, I wondered?
I went through the process again, only this time I lost a filter disk and the top of one of the filters down the drain. Well, I had new ones coming, and I could see that the disks were so blocked up, even after cleaning that they would restrict the air flow, so I left the filter disks out.
How was the ink getting up into the filters? I have used about half of the ink in the system the top of the ink level was half way down the tank from the filters. Then I realized that with the heat on the air in my apartment was really dry. Could it be simple evaporation? Was the ink evaporating and clogging the filters with pigment? I think so.
I did some thinking and came up with this solution:
New Ink Caps on my CISS
Those red caps are #8 Screw Protectors from the local building supply store. They fit nicely on the step at the base of the air inlet of the filters. It helped that the new filters arrived today as well. The caps ought to prevent evaporation of the ink when the printer is not in use. Of course, I will have to remember to remove them when I want to print something.
At the same time I ordered the filters (I ordered two sets so if I have to clean them again, I can just swap them out and keep printing while I did so), I ordered one of those waste ink bags from the guy in England that sells them on eBay. As soon as I get it installed, I will do several cleaning cycles. I hope this will be the last of that banding problem.
The Gods demand a Sacrifice
As you know I am trying to get setup to do more photography than I have b een doing in the past. I now have the capability of doing professional looking portraits. And, in that, things are moving a bit, I am schedule to do portraits at the local Senior Center next week. However, the car gods demanded a sacrifice last month and this month computer gods want their share. What that means is I had to spend money on the car last month, and the computer this monet (one o the hard drives went belly up.
The drive is still under warranty so I sent it into Western Digital for replacement. But, one of the connectors broke off the drive cage and I had to order a new cage, actually bought two from ebay. Because the dead drive was in a raid-5 array the computer is still working but a bit more slowly. I also need to get at least one more 500gb drive as the current 3 drive array is getting somewhat full, adding another drive will give me 1.5tb of storage v. the current 1tb.
Unfortunately, the money I am spending on the computer was earmarked to go toward buying a used DSLR, most likely a Nikon D1X although what I would like is a Kodak SLR/n. Well, maybe the new year will bring me another windfall. I need a camera with low shutter lag, that uses Compact Flash cards. Too bad Pentax never made a camera like that because I already have Pentax lenses.