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Goodbye to Clogged Printer Nozzles |
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Tom Hubbard
August 24, 2007
I just returned from a trip to Alaska with my family. With my family spread across the U.S., the trip took a year of planning and hundreds of emails between the travel agent and us. The experience was amazing. Breath-taking photo opportunities were everywhere.As I took each picture, I kept thinking, “I can’t wait to get home and starting printing.” For me, my home “darkroom” consists of Adobe’s PhotoShop software and my HP Pro B9180 printer.
Although I’ve been completely digital for over 7 years, my most nagging printer problem has been clogging. This clogging of the ink jet nozzles shows up as white streaks (banding) or totally missing colors in the prints. In the past, whenever I left my printer idle for more than a couple of days, I would spend countless hours and waste too much expensive ink trying to “unclog” the printer’s nozzles using the printer manufacturer’s cleaning routines.
This problem is the plague of printers that use today’s longer life pigment inks. My new Pro B9180 uses an “always ready” maintenance system to continually monitor the health of the printer’s ink jet nozzles. The printer is never turned off and the monitoring goes on behind the scenes without my intervention.
Much to my delight, and after letting my B9180 pigment printer sit idle for more than two weeks, my first print was a perfect match to the image on my computer screen – no banding and the colors were perfect. I was able to spend all my time crafting my final prints in PhotoShop, and I wasted no time or ink to bring my printer back to life.
Here are a few more photos from my Alaska excursion.
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Got some great vacation pictures of your own? Upload them to our photo gallery. I’d love to see your images.
category: photography products
