Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, 
"robert49brake" <robert49brake@...> wrote:

> things worse.  I also think that air in the carts can have a lot 
to do with what people think 
> are clogs, sitting overnight seems to help there as well.
>
Certainly I've had many more problems, on several printers, due to 
air than with clogs.  Some MIS carts (various types) I've had were 
faulty and leaked one way or another - the leaks can be very slow and 
lead to a little air lock after days or weeks.  (MIS were always good 
at replacing these when asked - even though I'm in Europe.)

IMHO it is quite important to determine whether the problem is air or 
clogs, as the approach to a cure is different. 

Nearly every time I had an air lock normal cleaning cycles made it 
worse - symptoms such as: a colour that had been OK or partially 
printing suddenly disappears (nearly) entirely as no more ink gets to 
the nozzles. 

To state the obvious: cleaning the wiper blade won't fix air locks 
and replacing faulty carts won't clean the wiper blade. It seems 
likely that, most of the time, dirt from the wiper blade will cover 
part of the head in a way that affects some nozzles on one or more 
colour, rather than every nozzle on one colour.  Is this other's 
experience too?  I've only had wiper blade problems once, and the 
symptom was a gap through the middle of every colour due to a stripe 
of dirt on the head. 

Of course it is not clear cut - I've seen people claiming that their 
wiper blade problem leads to a whole colour going missing....it just 
seems improbable to me that this would usually be the case.

Ken