Prograf 1000 XPS driver problem

[dkoretz]

I'm hoping somone with this printer is willing to test something.

I have used the XPS (16 bit) driver with my Prograf Pro 1000 since I bought it two or three years ago, with no problems until last week. Last week colors were suddenly off. It looked like blues weren't being laid down consistently. However, a nozzle check (three of them, actually) was perfect, and two regular and one deep head cleaning had no effect.

A Canon rep and I tried all sorts of things, and eventually we discovered that the problem only occurred using the XPS driver in Lightroom. (I always print from Lightroom, so that wasn't a change.) Printing from Lightroom with the regular 8-bit driver, which I had never used before, worked fine, as did printing from Canon Print Studio Pro, which only uses the 8-bit driver.

The rep said that he hadn't encountered this particular problem before but that driver problems often arise after other software is updated. I believe there was both a Windows update and a Creative Cloud update shortly before this problem started.

Unfortunately, I have no way to test this farther, so I don't know whether these updates mean that the XPS driver needs to be updated or I have a problem specific to my computer. I have spent literally hours trying in vain to get somone at Canon to test it on another machine.

If anyone else prints with this printer using the XPS driver under windows and using LR, I would be grateful to learn whether you have a problem as well. You can replicate it by printing the outback photo test print, http://www.outbackphoto.com/printinginsights/pi049/essay.html, and looking at the blue squares in the grid of colors. I noticed first on a print in which tan showed up as magenta, which suggested a lack of blue.

Thanks.

[askay4]

I just appened across this in the course of trying to troubleshoot what appears to be a problem I'm having with the XPS driver (trying to set a custom paper size crashes the driver and Lightroom). I printed the test image pointed to through Lightroom Classic using both XPS and 8-bit printer drivers and coould see no problem with the blue ink. Hope this helps -- happy to pursue additional specifics if it'd be useful.  

[dkoretz]

Thanks for the reply.

I've done a lot of testing since posting, and what the Canon tech concluded isn't correct. It's not a malfunction of the XPS driver. Rather, it's a printer malfunction that for some reason is much more severe with the XPS driver but still shows up some of the time with the 8-bit driver. It has nothing to do with Windows; I borrowed a mac and duplicated the problem.

It's odd because nozzle checks are perfect, and head cleanings have no effect. So the head isn't clogged, although it could be malfunctioning in other ways, e.g., letting enough ink through for a nozzle check but not enough for high-quality prints. I have no idea why the problem is much more severe with the XPS driver. That's above my pay grade.

I've sent very detailed information to Canon, including copies of several test shots using color patches, and I'm waiting to hear back. I hope they get back to me reasonably soon, as I have been without a functioning printer for two months now.