I've been experiencing some "slight" banding on semi-gloss paper with my Z3100.*
At first I thought the diagnostic for print heads was clean because I saw no banding in the solid patches and didn't notice any missing nozzles on the grid patterns. I did a head align and paper advance calibration without resolving it so I did head cleanings and when I printed the diagnostic again I noticed two gaps in PK. I went back to the first diagnostic and it too had slight gaps (faint print on a couple nozzles but not entirely missing) and figure this is the cause of my problem.
What I noticed when I looked at the example prints for "good" and "bad" test results in the Solutions tab of the driver is that the "good" example has far and away more nozzles missing than I do.
What is up with that? How can that produce acceptable results if I'm fussing over two half-clogged nozzles?
Wayne
* Visible in the reflectance of the print only in darker grays.
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For what it's worth-
1) The head alignment page frequently looks like crap with lots of banding, but this is 'mapped out' for real prints, so you can safely ignore it.
2) At least in my experience the Z3100 will at infrequent and random intervals start printing very slowly, with the head carriage stopping at the end of a line and waggling back & forth a few times before resuming. The resulting print will often show banding perpendicular to the direction of paper movement through the printer—i.e. across the width of the print as you stand in front of the printer waiting for it to drop into the basket. This is most visible in solid areas, especially shadows or deep blue skies. A head cleaning cycle or three will almost always resolve the situation. I suspect the problem is that the printer's internal algorithm for mapping out jets that are blocked reaches the limit of its capacity to cope, and suffers an electronic brain freeze.
3) Over time ink will build up on the underside of the head carriage, particularly around the matte black head, until it starts to drip onto prints and deposit itself on the foam "diapers" at the extreme left and right of head movement. You may start to see more frequent episodes of #2 above. In my case this took 7 months and many rolls of paper to show up. When it does, just pull all the heads and clean them with a Q-tip plus distilled water, use a coffee filter to clean the underside of the head carriage, and mop up the excess ink inside the printer. Replace the heads, and all is well.
