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Qimage Ultimate - print nozzle clearing patterm

Doug Kerr

Well-known member
The printing program Qimage Ultimate contains a useful feature - the generation of special patterns intended for use in unclogging ink jet print head nozzles that have become clogged.

There is a nice video that explains this feature, which has great flexibility:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcmmyYroPOQ&feature=youtu.be

The narrator begins by explaining a problem with using the nozzle unclog operations provided on many printers (he uses the Epson Stylus Photo R1900 as an example). He tells us that both the basic Head Cleaning operation and the advanced Auto Nozzle Check and Cleaning operation run a full unclog cycle on all nozzles for all colors, using a substantial amount of ink, even if only a few nozzles are clogged.

That was not my understanding with regard to the Epson Auto Nozzle Check and Cleaning operation. In this operation, a test pattern is printed and read by some sort of photoelectric detector scan to determine which, if any, nozzles are failing to deposit ink. Then I assume that the cleaning process (however that works) "focuses on" the nozzles that have not performed properly.

Thus I think this operation typically uses far less ink than the basic Head Cleaning operation. It it certainly seems as such to the extent I can discern ink consumption on the ink status display screen from the printer driver.

What do any of you know about this?

Thanks.

Best regards,

Doug
 
That was not my understanding with regard to the Epson Auto Nozzle Check and Cleaning operation. In this operation, a test pattern is printed and read by some sort of photoelectric detector scan to determine which, if any, nozzles are failing to deposit ink. Then I assume that the cleaning process (however that works) "focuses on" the nozzles that have not performed properly.

Hi Doug,

As far as I know, but I''m not an Epson user myself so I have it from hearsay, Epson printers do not focus on the clogged nozzles alone, but fires all of them. The only difference between a basic and advanced cleaning cycle is the amount of ink used (and probably some other controls that regulate the amount of ink per droplet).

Hence a lot of relatively expensive ink is wasted by flushing the non-clogged nozzles, for which Mike Chaney made a solution that is much simpler than printing specially crafted images with only particular colors/combinations of colors.

Cheers,
Bart
 

Doug Kerr

Well-known member
Yesterday I ran a test on my Epson SP R1900 that may or may not be relevant.

I started by determining (with the Nozzle Check operation) that there were apparently zero clogged nozzles.

I next grabbed a screen shot of the little "ink level" indicators. (I have no idea how precise their indication is.)

I then ran the Automatic Nozzle Check and Cleaning procedure.

The test pattern was only printed once, and showed no gaps. We might think that the routine did no cleaning.

After this process completed, I again grabbed a screen shot of the little "ink level" indicators. There was no discernible difference between this shot and the one before Automatic Nozzle Check and Cleaning procedure was run.

Some ink of course was consumed in printing the test pattern, but that consumption was evidently too small to be discernible on the little indicators.

I am still inclined to believe that this procedure bases what nozzles it cleans based on its observation of the first test pattern. Of course I don't know whether this is by individual nozzle or some larger unit.

I don't even know how the cleaning is done!

Best regards,

Doug
 
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