Originally Posted by
Scps
Hi,
even though you mainly use this printer for black and grayscale printing , this machine has a 5 colour printhead (large capacity black, photo black, cyan, magenta and yellow) the printhead sits in th carriage assembly underneath the ink cartridges
ink by its nature is designed to dry quickly so it doesn't rub off when it comes out of the printer, unfortunatly this means that it can dry up in the microscopic 'nozzles' of the print head.
to help prevent ink from drying up and clogging the nozzles, manufacturers design their printers to do a ' cleaning operation' these are the noises you hear your printer making when it's turned on or before a print job starts printing.
each time the printer does a clean it uses a small (variable) amount of ink,
most modern printers have different length cleans for different cicumstances ( how long the printer has been off, if the printhead or any cartridges were removed, etc,) the iP5200 has about 5 different size cleaning cycles
so you see, the ink being used is really to maintain the printhead which is the highest technology and most expensive part in the machine, if you were to fool the machine or disable this function in any way, your colour print quality would probably suffer
happy printing
Bookmarks