no access to manual print head alignment settings mg3620

[sg123]

I'm getting fun house mirror type wavy lines when I print and have done auto print head alignments a number of times to no effect. It's really curious to me that the printing on the print head alignment sheet that the printer produces doesn't have any of the wavy line problems. I am trying to do a manual print head alignment but all of the instructions I have found to do that refer to settings that are not available in the pop up menus and dialog boxes available to me either through my pc or ipad. When I open the main menu for the printer on my pc there is a section titled "device settings and maintenance" but the only options there are "quiet settings" and "auto power settings". When I open the printer app on my ipad and tap the icon for the 3620 and tap the utilities tab it takes me online where I enter my serial number. The utilities section there has many more options but nothing that will allow manual print head alignment. I've looked at the clear tape strip thing inside and it looks totally clean. Any help greatly appreciated!

[Patrick]

Hi sg123,

While it may look clean, a smudge on the encoder will cause the issue that you are experiencing.

Please clean the encoder following the steps in this article:

Cleaning the Encoder Film - MG3620

[sg123]

Hi Patrick,

Thanks so much for the suggestion. I did that and the problem persists. I should mention in addition to all the print being wavy vertically the text is also blurry and inconsistent in terms of the darkness. An inch of text will be darker and a bit clearer and the next inch will be lighter and blurry and that will repeat all the way down the page. I did the regular print head cleaning 2 times and the deep cleaning once and although the colors are getting clearer with cleaning there are horizontal white stripes that remain and even seem to be getting worse and the grid at the top started out fine and now has lots of missing area. Wow, really frustrating. The printer is less that 3 years old and has not had that much use. Any additional suggestions or info would be greatly appreciated!