Epson 9880 Magenta partial banding

InkjetMall Customer Support Printer Maintenance & Cartridges
1

Hello, Just purchased in good faith a 9880 from an Epson dealer in Holland. Not easy to find a unit in Europe. I’ve taken possession of the printer and couldn’t help notice some very light horizontal banding in the upper half on the magenta n]ozzle check. However it doesn’t seem to affect the image quality of the prints. Nonetheless, this is somewhat bugging me and i’d like to know what the issue is. The dealer said it was normal and wouldn’t affect the picture quality. He’s right on the latter, but normal?!

I printed each channels and magenta seems unaffected. See attached pic.

Ran all the auto-alignment and manual alignment, and in the manual alignment you can clearly see there is an issue.

I’m converting the printer to Piezo inks so I am currently flushing the inks. I ran a nozzle check and the issue is still there.

Waiting for some inks to come so I will leave it with flush for now.

Could anyone tell me what the problem is and if this is something that I can fix?

Many thanks! Gilles

IMG_20190127_123523 IMG_20190127_123547 IMG_20190127_124047 IMG_20190127_124116 IMG_20190127_124144 IMG_20190127_124246

2

This looks like the BiD alignment. Do a UniD manual alignment and then always print in UNiD (which piezo printers should do anyway) and most likely you’ll be ok. I’ve seen this on a couple x880s and it’s related to a dirty encoder strip or funky voltage going to the head. Normally this only shows on BiD printing though so check UniD.

Best,
Walker

3

Many thanks for your reply Walker and well spotted; the printing tests I did were in UniD, which is how I always print, and indeed they were perfect. I’ll check the encoder strip for dirt as well. Happy to hear this should not be a problem down the road.

All the best,

Gilles