@RussPro10 wrote:
I just tried 'business' and 'fast' combination and the print speed is about 10 seconds a page. Much better.
Do you leave your PRO10 turned on all the time?
Russ
Yes - definitely leave it on all the time. There's a reason for this.
The PRO-10 has a clock in it. It's not a real-time clock (it does not know the date & time). The clock's job is just to determine how much time has elapsed since the last time it did a nozzle purge and there are different levels/agressiveness of those purge cycles.
The advantage of the PRO-10 is that it uses "pigment" based ink instead of "dye" based ink. Pigments are much better for archival quality (they resist fading over the years). I've got inkjet photos that were gifted to me that were noticeably faded after just 3 years ... and it's now 6 years old and is terribly faded. In contrast, my "pigment" prints still look great (though I haven't owned my printer for very many years, I do have prints that are probably 4-5 years old by now and they still look like the day they were printed.)
But the downside to "pigment" is that it's easier to clog than dyes. This means that if you haven't used the printer in a while, you could end up with clogged nozzles. Dye-based printers clog too... they just take a little longer.
Canon solves this by running a purge cycle ... every 60 hours (for a PRO-10). The print-head parks over a seal (cap) to keep air from being exposed to the nozzle. But it's not like it's hermetically sealed. So as a precaution, it wakes up, moves the head over a "waste pad" (like a sponge) and spits just a tiny bit of ink onto the pad ... just to clear the ink that would have been "in" the nozzle. It's not much. Then it re-parks over it's seal and waits another 60 hours.
As long as you keep it powered on it will continue to do this.
If you power it off, unplug it, lose power, etc. then it has no idea how long it has been since a nozzle cleaning and, consequently, it does a more aggressive version of the nozzle cleaning & purging which wastes more ink.
If you turn off the printer for extended periods, then the ink can dry ... and now you've got dried & clogged nozzles that might be especially challenging to clean without several agressive cleaning cycles. So overall... you'll use less ink and have better performance if you just leave it turned on and let it do it's think (from time to time you'll hear it wake up and make some noise when you aren't printing... that's the printer doing it's 60 hour maintenance).
Jose Rodriguez (on YouTube) has a channel on printers. He has both Canon and Epson (and lots of them). He has an automatic job that prints out "something" on his printers that will exercise each color tank because the ink wasted to produce a tiny photo print is less costly than the ink wasted trying to clear nozzles after they clog.
On Canon printer, you don't have to do this because it'll run that maintenance job every 60 hours.
BTW, Canon's PRO-100 is a dye-based printer. Dyes clog ... but they take longer to clog. So the PRO-100 dye-based printer runs the maintenance job every 120 hours.
MANY years ago, my dear old mom had a Lexmark printer (dye-based inkjet). She wanted it so she could print photos of grand-kids, etc. But she only did this maybe once every 4 months. Quite literally EVERY time she wanted to print something ... the printer was clogged. I'd have to drive over, try to clear the clogs (and usually could not get every color working). That printer used the single combined color cartridge and one black cartridge. So I'd have to buy her a new pair of cartridges ... and I think it was something like $75 for the pair of catridges. I tried to get her to print something at least once per week (even if to just throw it away) becasue by my math... it was costing me $75 every time she wanted a 4x6" drug-store sized photo. (I quickly hooked her up with an online service and I paid the bill for her. This saved me a LOT of money!)
So these days... I'm happy to let my PRO-10 printer spit out a few drops of ink in exchange for trouble-free prints when I want to use the printer.
Tim Campbell
5D III, 5D IV, 60Da
