It's interesting the range of usage for these "Pro" printers where some belong to the "professional/production" implied use category with a heavier consistent output and others still used by "professionals" but more intermittent in output. And tales of woe straddle both albeit with a bias to the latter. And whether routines of head cleaning or occasional printing to mitigate against clogs are carried out.
Here's a thought.
The Epsons have settings for auto nozzle checks and cleanings. The Canons have settings that wake up from sleep and jiggle the ink cartridges as part of their routine.
Wouldn't it be worthwhile to have a setting where the printer outputs an actual image held in its firmware, at a settable time while it's in standby?
This standby mode would need to be the default "not-in-use" mode as opposed to "off" and obviously as a user initiated method at day's end and not a "lapse into" or "idle" mode if sitting for a half hour or more.
This standby mode is assumed to have the printhead at rest in its "capped" state to prevent dry-out.
The image is more like a user might cook up for a full colour check; that is, a line of 5mm square blocks for the number of pure cartridges/colours used as well as some mixed colours plus a sentence of text.
The issue of paper type/size to be kept in. The line of spaced 5mm colour blocks would easily fit in an A4 page width and, with the text, only be about 10mm high, though it might depend on what minimum paper is possible. The manuals suggest that roll paper isn't kept in unused printers so unloading expensive art rolls and putting in some plain A4 or even A3 shouldn't be a hassle.
Also, the routine's algorithm would need to operate the printer so that it could print a bunch of these without ejecting the paper. With margins, an A4 or Letter could maybe allow for 28 outputs. I chose that 28 as it might allow the algorithm to do a 4-per-day for a week, 2-per-day for 2 weeks etc, etc depending how you might feel about that type of output as a preventative compared to an actual photo.
Would this be a viable answer to the low-use high-clog-problems that seem to be inherent to printers meant more perhaps for higher volume/time use?
Too much to hope that persons of influence in the printer industry could say, aha great idea and begin an implementation process?
I obviously have no idea about what's involved tech-wise getting this done, firmware updates etc etc. I don't see it as _very_ complicated mind you. And cost, might it add 100usd, if that and even if no more than getting on for 200usd, having that to mitigate clogs is small compared with what we've seen in Eric's thread and others here and elsewhere.
Whaddya think?