Two odd iPF5000 behaviors

[thompsonkirk]

First, we experienced a very brief power failure, hardly a second, & everything came back on right away - except the Canon printer.  The power switch was dead as a doornail (whatever a doornail is?). The printer had been plugged in via 2 daisy-chained surge protectors, but wouldn't turn on either in that socket, or plugged directly into the wall.  I feared that a small power irregularity had fried a fragile power supply.

There's nothing in the manual about this & I didn't see a reset button, so I called Canon customer service & was told I should unplug the printer for 10-15 minutes "so that the capacitors would drain," which sounded like voodoo to me.  

But it works.  If you can't power up, don't call Canon until you try unplugging the printer from its power source & just letting it rest for a while.  You can plug it in & power it up later, when it's feeling better.  It just needs a bit of sick leave.  

Second, after a couple more prints via the 16-bit plug-in - an image with with wide white borders around the image area - the printer decided spontaneously to add a neat 3/8" cyan stripe right down the middle of one of the long-dimension borders.   This was a nice & potentially creative little gift, but cyan didn't really harmonize with the image colors.  

Again, the "Troubleshooting" section didn't say how to exorcize this evil spirit, so I just turned the printer off & powered it up again.  Next print OK.  That's sort of a fix, but not as good as preventing such stripes in the first place.  Has anyone seen & dealt with them?  Or is there at least a setting to choose a nice stripe color?

[John Hollenberg]

Thanks for these reports.  Added to the Wiki FAQ.

--John

[K.C.]

The power switch was dead as a doornail (whatever a doornail is?).
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=92432\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

The idiom 'dead as a doornail' dates from the fourteenth century. Costly metal nails hammered into the outer doors of the wealthy (most people used the much cheaper wooden pegs), which were clinched on the inside of the door and therefore were "dead," that is, could not be used again.  

And as you've now learned Canon's claim about the caps is correct. This can happen with anything using a voltage reducing/regulating power supply. Computers and printers typically run at a low internal voltage of anywhere from 12-48 volts. The caps store power to prevent brown-outs and to absorb overages from voltage spikes, thus reducing and regulating.

Using an automatic voltage regulating (AVR) UPS with a printer is just as important as using one for your computer these days.