Do you have Lines in your
printing?
One of the most common issues with printing high quality images
on your home printer are those darn lines that muck up your nice
image, but why? Your printer is not printing correctly due to a
blockage or shortage of ink, therefor the lines show up lighter
on the page. This can happen to any of the colors your printer uses
if it's been some time since you last used the printer due to the
ink drying inside the ink jets, which are much smaller than a human
hair. Relax you don't have to buy a new printer, it just needs a
few minutes to go through the cleaning cycle, or if it only has
one head a new cartridge.
Cleaning your printer is usually done with the software that came
with it. From here I'll detail how to clean an Epson printer and
it's likely that most printers will use a similar process. Let's
start with that image you wanted to print. Start by choosing print
with preview. Once the preview is ready click on "page setup",
then "printer" and then properties (from the windows control
panel choose the printer, click on "printer" at the top
left and choose "printing preferences"). You should now
have the screen up where you can choose resolution, paper size and
type etc. Click on the Maintenance tab, then "nozzle check"
and the software will ask you to print or finish. Click on print
and you will see what color is not printing correctly (one trick
I use here is to cut a sheet of paper in half so that I can print
on the top half and the bottom half to save paper, but be sure to
number which print is which to monitor progress).
If your nozzle check resulted in a bad test print click clean and
your printer will push a bit of ink out of the ink jets as a rubber
squeegee then scrapes across the printer head surface. Following
the cleaning you need to do another "nozzle check" until
the test is printing correctly. I usually will only clean 2-3 times
due to the amount of ink the process uses, before letting the printer
sit for an hour or more to let things loosen up. During that time
the ink that was just pushed through can soften up the dried ink
so that the next cycle has a better chance to correct all of the
nozzles.
Now that you have everything all cleaned up there is one last step
to getting the best out of your printer and that is to make sure
all of the ink jet are aligned correctly. With Epson's maintenance
software, there is a print head alignment utility that will step
by step check that everything is pointed where it thinks it is,
resulting in sharper images. This process uses a lot less ink than
the cleaning, but will use a few sheets of paper, just follow the
prompts and you should be ready to get back to that image you wanted
to print ;-) To avoid this issue in the future just print and image
of any sort with a full color range every few weeks so nothing dries
up on you.
Think Green only use recycled
cartridges! If you will be printing a bunch there are Ink refill
systems that allow you to flow ink into the cartridge, without removing
it. To use a system like this you usually need to defeat the chip
installed at the front of the cartridge. This chip is designed to
help monitor the amount of ink in the cartridge and will expire
itself if you remove the cartridge.
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