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3880 mystery problem

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Dale_Cotton:
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!

smthopr:

--- Quote from: Dale_Cotton on March 23, 2018, 01:05:19 pm ---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!

--- End quote ---

my 3800 stopped printing black.  And had sat unused for a while.  But I had a full set of ink carts already purchased.  I elected to have the printer serviced and it required replacing a pump (I think it has to do with black ink switching) and the repair cost about $350.  After the repair, I discovered that 3 magenta nozzles no longer work and would require a new print head.  The printer seems to print ok without the three magenta nozzles and I don't see any banding in the prints. 

But, if I were to do it again, I would have tried to sell the remaining ink and buy a new printer.  I was told by the service man that these pumps will fail after 5+ years.  If there had been 3880 still for sale, I might have gotten one of those as it could have used most of my ink, but they are now history new or refurb...

Wayne Fox:
I seem to recall that some users that never switched from PK to Mk eventually had a failure of the switch mechanism in the head which caused leaking back ink?  You might want to google that a little.

Maybe doing a ink switch 3 or 4 times would push enough ink through to get loosen it up and get it working right again?  Just a thought.

dasuess:
From what I have read the problem occurs when you do do a switch after a long period of no switching. I only print on matte paper, so have not done a switch for at least five years on my R3000 that I bought in 2012. It’s still going strong, but when it dies I have no plans to fix it. I will move upto the P800.


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Eric Myrvaagnes:
I had that problem on my roughly 7-year-old 3800 in which I only used PK ink: Black ink splotches on prints, and the PK cartridge running empty even though the chip thought it was full. Considering the age of the printer and other reports of the same problem, I decided to move up to the P800, which is doing just fine for me.

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