Epson R3000 intermittent banding - will Piezoflush help?

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1

Hi Walker & other experts,

I have a fairly old (2012) Epson R3000 that I regulary use for photo printing on baryta-type papers. I recently noticed faint and fairly irregular banding in blue areas, parallel to printhead travel direction. Have a look at the picture below: pure cyan at 5% printed through the QTR calibration mode at 1440dpi. Printhead travel is top to bottom - unidirectional.

Patch

Note the “roughness/unevenness”…this is not the paper structure, but the actual print. The same print using magenta looks much smoother (although not 100% perfect).

Here is a full nozzle check:

Full_nozzle

and a close-up of the cyan channel with some weird stuff going on:

Cyan_nozzle

The printhead has been cleaned (also manually using paper towels + Windex), aligned and the ink is new. Would this be something that can be solved by purging the ink system with Piezoflush or am I looking at the early stages of printhead delamination?

Looking forward to an expert opinion on this!

Many thanks in advance,
Wim

2

Dear Wim, this is a new one to me for this printer but roughness does appear on heads as the nozzles slowly become unable to fire micro-dots (3.5 picoliter dots).

best
-Walker

3

Thanks, Walker.

So basically a wear-related failure mechanism? I didn’t expect that after only a few 1000 A4 equivalent prints. Is there anything I can do to explore this in more detail?

Thanks again,
W.

4

I would start with a uni-directional head alignment (manual head alignment)

-Walker