I am having horrible nozzle clogs with the PiezoDN inks on my 1430 printer. I’m using refillable My Carts and cannot get a clean nozzle check with the Piezo Inks. However if I put the Epson inks into the printer and print a nozzle check pattern it is clean without even running a cleaning cycle. I’ve made sure that my carts are refilled and I just don’t understand.
Any thoughts would be helpful.
Thanks. Andy
What I’ve found is that often the nozzle check is not exactly a predictor of weather a nozzle is “clogged” or not, it’s more a factor of whether their is micro-air inside of the nozzle channel. This is actually usually expressed with the first few lines of ink (before the image of the negative).
What I suggest is to actually run 1 cleaning (and 1 cleaning only). let the printer sit for a few minutes. And then run your print.
Obviously make sure that you set the paper size to be 2.4 inches shorter than the actual paper size so that you don’t catch the print head on the back of the film (if you have gotten rid of your star wheels).
After a print and another sit, you may be surprised to find all nozzles firing.
best,
Walker
Related to that:
We have been supporting the 1430 (and 1400) for many many years with Piezo ink with great success. But it seems the build quality of both the printers and available cartridges on the market (that we test all the time mind you) have gone down somewhat. We have therefore gone back to the drawing table and have recently come up with a new 1430 cartridge of our own design that is new and works very well indeed (better pressure flow control and air filters, etc). This is very similar to what we did with the my-ink capsules and keys (a unique design put out by us). While this has never been a problem with printing-on-paper even with current cartridges, the unique requirements of digital negatives are ultra precise placement of all dots. Often the first few lines of printing will fix nozzle issues on the 1430 (with current carts), but we still want to make sure everyone gets good nozzle checks regardless, and that is why we’ll soon introduce a new small-format cartridge design. This is for all small format printers, not just the 1430. This doesn’t mean the current cartridges won’t perform well when actually printing (nozzle check on these printers doesn’t tell the whole story), but that the new carts will simply register a correct nozzle check.
The shipment of production cartridges is on its way so it will be soon. I will let this forum know when they drop.
all the best,
Walker
Walker - will the new carts for the 1430 be available as part of the CISS? I bought the CISS system for my 1430 a few months ago and have noticed that my clean nozzle check has gone down somewhat since I first installed the CISS.
Not at moment. CISS is a different beast all together and the internal architecture would have to be very different to enable CISS.
I suggest getting a 1430 cartridge set as backup for your css though.
best.
Walker