This is a nozzle test.
This is something I made.
From time to time I'm running the printer and I notice horizontal banding.
Now, on a Latex printer it's generally pretty rare.
There's several reasons for it.
The optical drop detection.
The cleaning process.
The redundant nozzles on the printhead.
The fact that it's a water-based ink.
Thermal print heads.
All that works together to ensure that horizontal banding is pretty unusual.
You almost always get nice solid color.
But every once-in a-while it happens.
Now, there can be a couple things.
One, your printhead could just be old enough, and it finally gave up the ghost.
It tries to replace nozzles with nozzles.
It's out of nozzles to replace nozzles with.
Time to say goodbye to the printer, or printhead.
You do that by checking how old the printhead is.
You know, let's say it's got 6000 milliliters through it;
you probably have a printhead that needs to be replaced.
Time to replace it.
Then the question is, hmm, I got two of them that are kind of old.
Which one is it?
So, I have a chart that I made, which helps me identify that if I feel like I have a nozzle out,
or I'm having some kind of image quality that could be related to banding,
horizontal banding, I run this chart.
This chart represents 100 percent solid cyan, 100 percent yellow, one hundred percent magenta,
one hundred percent black.
Now, I initially did these 50 and 30.
I think I had a conversation with somebody on our engineering team that said…
I can't remember if he said 23 or 28 percent, where the crossover is,
from the transition to light to dark ink.
So, what I would probably do in the future is make these two here 20 percent;
20 percent magenta, 20 percent cyan.
That means when the file goes over, the printer is only
going to use the light ink printhead to print those colors.
Then what I'm looking for is, who's our culprit.
Where is this banding coming from?
And if it's clearly, let's say in the magenta here, and there's nothing here.
This is perfect, and this is banding, and everything is fine.
That means, there are two printheads that have magenta, and it's one of them.
I just don't know what one yet.
But at least I've narrowed it down.
And this is a very simple chart that will help you narrow it down.
Now, on the embedded web server, okay; the embedded web server, in the very last tab,
which is a service tab, there's a way to go to all pages for the printer.
You want printer information.
And the last tab is all pages.
Click that.
It'll take a second.
When it refreshes, what it's done is, it's gone on to the printer, and it's connected to it.
And it has read every single nozzle on the printer that's out.
And it will list them; slot 1, slot 2, slot 3, slot 4, and so on.
What you're looking for is, I already know it's a magenta printhead.
I just don't know what one.
It's one of two.
And I don't want to pull them both.
So, now I look at my nozzle out, and one of them has a long string,
the other one doesn't have a long string.
OK.
It's that slot.
That's the one I pull.
So, once I pull the printhead, then I have a choice.
If I think it's really, you know, served its life, has a nice long arc on it,
I got excellent mileage, I'll probably just put another one in.
It's time.
On the other hand, if I think it's not too old, and maybe there could be just something
on the nozzles, I might clean it.
And we're going to go over that in the next video.
But for now, I want you to see this chart, and know how this works.
Now, there's two ways you can send it over.
In Onyx, all of my color settings for solid colors,
individual channels, are set to pure hues.
So, yellow, black, magenta, cyan; all of those are set that if it's just cyan,
it only uses the cyan printhead to print cyan.
You can also achieve the same thing by turning all ICC profiles off.
And that will allow them to go as a pure hue.
Either one will get you to the same goal.
I have pure hues always turned on for solid single colors within the workflow.
So, make a chart like this.
Run it. It helps you really isolate what the issue is.
And that way, at least you can concentrate on what the problem is if it's pretty clear
and evident where it's coming from.