Digital BW, The Print

Hi Steve,


thanks for your detailed post, but unfortunately I did everything you 
suggested. I will give you a more detailed report on what I`ve done 
yet.
Some weeks ago I moved to a new flat. During the drive to the new 
house I tried to leave the ink-bottles and the printer on the same 
heigh. Some days later. I printed fifty thick cards. I therefore 
changed the lever from 0 to + position (it's in the + position since 
then, because I mainly print on Tetenal or Permajet 240g Archival 
Matte). During that time I often got bad nozzlechecks and after one 
photo-print was suddenly missing the grey color, I decided to flush 
the cards using the syringe-method the MIS-guys suggested on their 
site (I did everything exactly as they described except the step 
where a brand new cardrige set is needed in order to check if the 
print head works fine...sorry ;-), but apart from the bad nozzle 
checks I got from time to time the prints were perfect-no banding 
whatsoever! So the printheads were ok until that point). After that 
the trouble began: I got very fine horizontal lines on my prints 
(microbanding, I guess), although I always had a perfect nozzle-
check. It seemed as if less ink came onto the paper than before the 
card-flush. The whole image didn't look as "rich" as it looked 
before. After that I tried some methods I learned from various 
forums: Printing out the purge-file. No improvement. Run various 
cleaning-cycles. Still no improvement. Then I tried realigning the 
printheads several times along with the Windex-trick and the raising 
of the bottles. After that the picture looked better, significantly 
better, but the banding is still there. Since I'm a photographer, 
this situation is very vexing for me. Now I'm going to sacrifice one 
more sheet of my beloved Tetenal Archival Matte and do a proper 
Windex-treatment before that. Then I realign the heads once more, but 
if this doesn't work, then say goodbye to Mr. Epson :-< . So Steve, 
after hearing my whole story - do you have any idea what could cause 
this problem or if there is any other thing I should test? My 
suspicion is that I made something wrong during the card-flush. Maybe 
I should repeat it, now with the cardrige-step included? Apart from 
that, do you think that the hp 7960 can print out b/w as beautiful as 
my Epson with the MIS-inks? 

Thanks for your advice. I'm actually quite desperated. 

Regards,

Peter