Digital BW, The Print

Antonis,

Your wrote:

>I found with my 1160 that I lost the midtones after a
>period of inactivity, even though nozzle checks were clean.

I may be having a similar problem with my 1160 and the Generations color I
have in a CIS -- that mostly sits there unused.  The nozzle checks finally
got perfect after a lot of cleaning, but when I go to print a purge pattern
the inks start to band really badly after being solid for a while.  I can
print snapshots fine, because there is not enough solid color for long
enough to trigger the problem.  However, I suspect with a large print I'd
get banding half way through it.

It acts like there is a small reserve of ink that the printer can pull
through the system easily, but when that reserve is gone, it can't deliver a
solid color any more.  Very weird.  With newly-filled carts the 1160 has
none of these problems.

>It should be standard procedure to print a grayscale and check it
>against a known good sample (or read it with a densitometer) ...

We might get very depressed.  These printers are not all that consistent.
My 1160 often seems to need to warm up for about an hour before it gets to
where it was the day before.  Then on other days, it is rock solid from the
beginning.

>... do these inks settle?

Well, of course, one seller tells me that the other seller's inks settle --
what a surprise.  I'd guess we all ought to be agitating the pigmented inks.
Brownian motion is supposed to keep the inks suspended, but ....  With the
CIS units, it's fairly easy to swish them around.  Maybe with my 3000 I'll
just have to pick the whole thing up and give it a few inversion agitations.
;)

Actually, I'm not sure I have ever detected any settling in any of the inks.
I'm just suspicious by nature.

Paul