what can I do with a Z3100PS GP ?

[Kyle Jackson]

Hey that's great news! Must've jiggled something loose there somehow.

No worries, I'm happy to accept credit for doing absolutely nothing but backseat-driving lol  Cheers!

[mrleonard66]

Glad to see another Z3100PS user!
Any idea where I can get a MK/R printhead? I have been looking everywhere. I have a show coming up in fall and need to print a LOT.

[Endeavour]

Glad to see another Z3100PS user!
Any idea where I can get a MK/R printhead? I have been looking everywhere. I have a show coming up in fall and need to print a LOT.

ebay or sometimes Amazon have printheads at not insane prices

[mrleonard66]

ebay or sometimes Amazon have printheads at not insane prices

I haven't found though. Any links would be great!

[Endeavour]

They pop up occasionally, just have to keep an eye out



All this does re-enforce the point that at some point I need to move on from the Z3100

But what to replace with which meets the following criteria:

1) wide format (at least 24")
2) can sit for weeks without being used and not dry up
3) has readily available supplies
4) capable of printing to a quality for exhibitions / sale

[Kyle Jackson]

All this does re-enforce the point that at some point I need to move on from the Z3100

But what to replace with which meets the following criteria:

1) wide format (at least 24")
2) can sit for weeks without being used and not dry up
3) has readily available supplies
4) capable of printing to a quality for exhibitions / sale

I asked similar a while back and got very limited response:
https://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=143484.0
But a lot of people have moved on from this forum, and I guess printing in general. You have to sort of mine the forums to see what people are using and saying about them.

There's obviously a lot of Epson and Canon options to consider. I don't see much mention of HP's successor (Z9+) in recent years. Some said it's ahead of the z3100 / z3200 in many ways, but also that it lost some capability (seemed to generally be summed up as productivity gains with some loss of print quality, at least at the fussy/geeky end of things, especially the B&W crowd).

[Endeavour]

yeah it seems hard to get a concise answer. you have to filter out the "well I own xyz printer and I like it" which doesnt progress the discussion

We were spoilt with the z3x00's I think - such a great device, and even look nice in the corner of your office/studio - the epsons look like the equivalent of 1960's concrete apartment blocks

Maybe I can compromise on requirement #2, if I built my own print server which periodically runs an automated generic print job to keep everything flowing. But I would have to remember not to have expensive paper loaded
The key here really is knowing how long the newer printers can reasonably sit for without gunking up.

[mrleonard66]

Thx for your input guys. Sems we are a small club lol. ANy leads on a good mthod to try to clean/restore my existant MK/R head? I did get it 'sort of ' working ok a bit when I ran cleaning a lot. That said...I was only printing Glossy and only really needed the R to work better....not I want to print Matte so want to restore the printhead if possible...

[Endeavour]

print the diagnostic image from the maintenance menu, and see what it looks like

next, as kyle advised, weigh the printhead on some kitchen scales. 60g is a full printhead low 50's likely means there is air in there.

an empty printhead is around 48 - 49g so in theory its about 5g of ink (x2 for each colour)

So this means, if your printhead is reading 53g you dont know if thats an equal amount of ink or one chamber could be full and the other side empty.

I got a primer / refill tool from these guys:
https://www.inkowl.com/inkjet/ink-refill-tools/hp/printhead-repair-tool-for-hp-70-72-73-88-91-761-762-771-773-774-940/P5035/

LPS also do one - I dont know where you are located so depends on your closest place.

That will suck the air out of the printhead and draw in fresh ink from a funnel. Works ok, only it draws in both sides at the same time, so dont just fill up one ink.


that what I used to bring my printheads back to life.
One thing to note as Kyle has already said - if its been printing air not ink, then the printhead will likely be shot as that burns it out - but its certainly worth a try.


personally, I think I would just get a compatable printhead and save myself the faff of priming - it can be messy

[Kyle Jackson]

print the diagnostic image from the maintenance menu, and see what it looks like

next, as kyle advised, weigh the printhead on some kitchen scales. 60g is a full printhead low 50's likely means there is air in there.

an empty printhead is around 48 - 49g so in theory its about 5g of ink (x2 for each colour)

So this means, if your printhead is reading 53g you dont know if thats an equal amount of ink or one chamber could be full and the other side empty.

I got a primer / refill tool from these guys:
https://www.inkowl.com/inkjet/ink-refill-tools/hp/printhead-repair-tool-for-hp-70-72-73-88-91-761-762-771-773-774-940/P5035/

LPS also do one - I dont know where you are located so depends on your closest place.

That will suck the air out of the printhead and draw in fresh ink from a funnel. Works ok, only it draws in both sides at the same time, so dont just fill up one ink.


that what I used to bring my printheads back to life.
One thing to note as Kyle has already said - if its been printing air not ink, then the printhead will likely be shot as that burns it out - but its certainly worth a try.


personally, I think I would just get a compatable printhead and save myself the faff of priming - it can be messy

I've had empty heads as low as 43g, but yeah either way they don't hold very much ink. (There's also an inflatable air bladder inside them connected to an external port that we believe is used to compensate for atmospheric pressure changes, so that complicates how much usable ink volume there actually is inside.)

Some purge kits have caps that will do one colour/side at a time, like the one pictured here:
https://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=141083.msg1260281#msg1260281
It has a semi-circle hole with a divider down the middle to separate the 2 rows of printhead nozzles. I need to get one these, mine has a round hole and no divider so it pulls both colours at once, which isn't great if one side needs more priming than the other.

The printer stores error/status codes for all printheads and ink cartridges, access from the printer control panel. The numbers can then be looked up in the service manual to see what they mean, and determine whether a head is fried or not. Some info here for ref:
https://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=141083.msg1258667#msg1258667


Re post above about exercising the printer once in a while, if you have a PS model then it stores printjobs internally, so can easily reprint a recent job directly from the front panel. (I forget if the Embedded Web Server also has an automated job scheduler...) But remembering to do it weekly/monthly/whatever is still the weak link lol, I'm rotten at it. Leaving cheap paper loaded helps (I tend to burn matte since MK is the worst for clogs, tho that leaves PK and E neglected).

[Endeavour]

going back to the "what would I replace the z3100 with"

I forgot that pretty much only the designjets have the built in spectrophotometer for creating icc profiles natively in the printer. If I switched to an Epson or Canon, I'd also need to buy an external xrite for generating paper profiles - and those are not cheap.

[Kyle Jackson]

going back to the "what would I replace the z3100 with"

I forgot that pretty much only the designjets have the built in spectrophotometer for creating icc profiles natively in the printer. If I switched to an Epson or Canon, I'd also need to buy an external xrite for generating paper profiles - and those are not cheap.

Yup, it's definitely a huge perk! Built-in spectro with automatic target printing, paper handling during scanning, and profile integration. HP really did a great job putting all that together.

These are the only wide-format printers I've ever had so I always assumed that all brands had similar, until reading these forums and discovering nope, they have to buy print spectros, software, etc. and scan it all manually unless they go for an ever higher end target scanning rig.

So when browsing around for what I might get as a successor (if I ever do) I hit the same wall you did. For now I've decided it's better for me to keep these ones running as long as I can. For my small-volume / home printing the Z3X00's really are a great fit.

[JCD]

I love the built in XRite spectro too. I’ve found the 1700 patch profile is as good as my 2000 patch ones I made with my hand created I1 X-Rite Pro 3 spectro. You can also have great ones from the auto ISIS device  in Seattle made here - http://www.chromix.com/colorvalet/print/

John




quote author=Kyle D Jackson link=topic=144894.msg1266456#msg1266456 date=1754502824]
Yup, it's definitely a huge perk! Built-in spectro with automatic target printing, paper handling during scanning, and profile integration. HP really did a great job putting all that together.

These are the only wide-format printers I've ever had so I always assumed that all brands had similar, until reading these forums and discovering nope, they have to buy print spectros, software, etc. and scan it all manually unless they go for an ever higher end target scanning rig.

So when browsing around for what I might get as a successor (if I ever do) I hit the same wall you did. For now I've decided it's better for me to keep these ones running as long as I can. For my small-volume / home printing the Z3X00's really are a great fit.
[/quote]

[Kyle Jackson]

I love the built in XRite spectro too. I’ve found the 1700 patch profile is as good as my 2000 patch ones I made with my hand created I1 X-Rite Pro 3 spectro. You can also have great ones from the auto ISIS device  in Seattle made here - http://www.chromix.com/colorvalet/print/

There's some threads on here about making custom profiling targets for use in the Z3X00 printers. I think up to 10000-patch has been tested. There's different ways to get them "into the printer" and scanned.

I started trialling some 1728-patch targets before some life intervened and I haven't gotten back to it yet. I think the built-in default target is 464 patches.

Some great capability thanks to the built-in spectro...

[JCD]

Mark and I made a 6000 patch target for my Z3200 with help from his son , an engineer at Microsoft. Mark Mc Cormick made a 1000 path one but that was a little overkill.

That 6000 patch target gave we totally dead neutral awesome black and white on Platine.

You know you can make 1728 patch targets right in the Z spectro software and for me the color is as good as the 6000 patch, except for black and white. The thing is the new bundle Z software firmware package will only do the linearization, and fails on the icc calibration so I use an older Mac Pro which does work.

Don’t know about windows……

John

There's some threads on here about making custom profiling targets for use in the Z3X00 printers. I think up to 10000-patch has been tested. There's different ways to get them "into the printer" and scanned.

I started trialling some 1728-patch targets before some life intervened and I haven't gotten back to it yet. I think the built-in default target is 464 patches.

Some great capability thanks to the built-in spectro...

[Kyle Jackson]

Mark and I made a 6000 patch target for my Z3200 with help from his son , an engineer at Microsoft. Mark Mc Cormick made a 1000 path one but that was a little overkill.

That 6000 patch target gave we totally dead neutral awesome black and white on Platine.

You know you can make 1728 patch targets right in the Z spectro software and for me the color is as good as the 6000 patch, except for black and white. The thing is the new bundle Z software firmware package will only do the linearization, and fails on the icc calibration so I use an older Mac Pro which does work.

Don’t know about windows……

John

Yup that's the tests I read about here, and also tried that dropper tool from Mark's son.

Yeah I started off with the 1728-patch included in the HP software, and then went down a separate rabbit on another printer issue and didn't get back to it (which was that my Z3100 was stupidly outclassing the Z3200 gamut volume and black level...). I also briefly tried the old HP APS software which has some different target options. So I didn't get to try out the larger custom targets yet. I think the 1728 would be more than enough for me.

In Windows I use the "original" HP Utility, which has been v.1.17.0.3 since forever... And ~2012 drivers as everything I've seen after that have been "universal" drivers that break features on the Z-series.