My 3880 is 5 years old. For most of the past year I’ve been taking a sabbatical from photography and have mainly been printing little 2” reductions of a Passport/Gretag-Macbeth chart (with M,C,Y & K primary squares) every 5 days to keep the ink flowing. Very occasional larger prints intermixed. Only one easily-fixed clog in this time. For the past few months, however, I’ve been getting streaks of black ink randomly over the paper. The streaks are about an inch long, 1/4 inch wide, run in the direction of the print head and are fat with wet ink. Test pattern showed no clogs, and a cleaning if anything made the problem worse.
Recently this stopped when I unintentionally left the printer on between two 5-day intervals. However, what I now find is that my black ink cart, that was nearly full before the streaking, is now actually empty. Yet is still showing maybe 90% full in the printer dialogue.
The black ink cart has run dry early, while still showing maybe 3% ink left, twice before with this printer. Totally mystified. Assume having a technician in will cost a good fraction of a replacement P800. My mechanical-technical/do-it-myself skills tend to be in the minus numbers region, not even zero. So would need very detailed hand-holding if there is a do-it-myself fix to try.
I’d appreciate any thoughts!
