Aging PIXMA G3200 Color Banding and Ghost Printing

crosspeen — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 13:12:04 GMT

I have a 5 year old Canon G3200. Overall this has been a nice budget document and photo printer. The mega ink tanks truly make the printer cost effective. I tend to be an infrequent printer user and had to learn to keep printer on and attempt to use once a week to prevent getting air bubbles in the long ink delivery tubes.

My printer may have reached the end of its service life due to color banding in photos. No amount of print head cleaning nor alignment seems to work. I am seeking potential community advise here before ordering a new printer. The cleanest printer Test Page seems to indicate a few problems. The "C", "M", "Y" labels for the test color bars show a ghost printed letter offset to the right by maybe 0.5mm in a different color (Magenta left/Cyan right). The top Cyan color bar has a slightly concave left edge and mirrored convex right edge. All of the printed color bars appear to have a slight color gradient (bolder edges fading to slightly lighter center).

The automated Print Head alignment does seem to adjust values when executed but doesn't seem to correct any of the observed issues.

Any advice?

Also, with this printer executing the "System Cleaning" from the Printer Utility application seems to go into endless cycles requiring a power interrupt before the tanks are fully emptied. This doesn't appear to be expected behavior since System Cleaning advises not to perform if tank levels are below the single dot.

topic Aging PIXMA G3200 Color Banding and Ghost Printing in Desktop Inkjet Printers

Aging PIXMA G3200 Color Banding and Ghost Printing