Inkjet printer maintenance can keep your printer running at peak efficiency. In this video, you’ll learn about cleaning print heads, replacing inkjet cartridges, inkjet printer calibration, and clearing jams.
One of the biggest problems you’ll run into on an inkjet printer is keeping that print head clean. There are a number of processes used across different printers to be able to maintain this, and you’ll want to check with your printer manufacturer to see the best practices for keeping that print head clean and able to work properly.
For example, many printers run through an automated cleaning process every 24 hours. That’s to wipe off any excess or dried ink that’s on the print head, and keep that print head as clean as possible. If you’re getting streaks of color across the page, it’s probably because there’s some excess ink that is still on the printheads. Many inkjet printers also allow you to start this process manually. So if you use your printer a lot during the day, you may find that it needs to be cleaned more than every 24 hours. And if you’re very careful, you may be able to remove the print head or the entire print cartridge from the printer and very carefully clean that print head off.
Here’s an example of an inkjet print head that has accumulated ink over a 24-hour period. And here’s the same print head after cleaning.
The ink cartridges themselves are usually either separate colors or combined into a single cartridge. You usually will find cyan, magenta, yellow, and key, which is the black color, and it’s usually designated as CMYK. Here’s an example of these colors in an inkjet printer. You can see that the cyan, magenta, and yellow colors are all combined in a single cartridge, and the black color is separate. On other printers, you may find completely separate cartridges for the cyan, magenta, and yellow, making it very modular to replace.
These are usually very quick and easy to replace. They pop right out of their holder inside the printer, and you can replace the new one in just a few seconds. Once you add a new cartridge, the printer will normally go through a calibration process, which takes a few minutes, to make sure that all of those colors line up properly on the output. And because these are usually all plastic in their construction, it’s usually a good idea to recycle your ink cartridges. Here’s a good view of replacing one of those inkjet cartridges. They pop right out of the slot, and you can put a new one in its place.
The calibration is an important step, and you may need to calibrate the printer even when you haven’t replaced a new cartridge. This makes sure that all of the colors align properly with the information across all of those individual print cartridges. This calibration is usually an automated process, but you may find that making slight changes to the calibration can make the output just a little bit more crisp and have a much better result in your final printed page.
Here’s an example of a page that’s printed for calibration. You can see a number of colors are on this page, and we have some marks that we can use to help line up all of those different colors together. Here’s a closer view of the calibration page showing the different colors of the CMYK. And you can also see the calibration marks so that you can line up those very precisely.
We send a lot of paper through our inkjet printers. And occasionally, you will have one of those pages catch on the mechanisms inside the printer and cause a paper jam. Many inkjet printers provide you with a lot of access to the entire paper path, so you may be able to open the cover of the printer and easily remove that paper.
Other printers may have a more complex paper path, so you want to be very careful when removing that paper to make sure that you’re able to pull the entire page out without ripping any little pieces that might stay inside of the printer. Once you pull that paper out, check it and make sure that you didn’t leave any parts of it inside of the paper path. And then you can try printing your output again.