Canon S9000 Woes; (or: What's a GOOD printer?)

[Rob-F]

My s9000 was banding, so I called Canon tech support. They walked me through a few steps, including running a printing test (looked OK); then downloading another driver (didn't help). Then they told me my s9000 was shot, and too old to be repaired. Then they offered to sell me another printer at a discount.

But I'm tired of replacing the six inks--at $15 apiece, and the one they wanted to sell me uses eight of them at $17 apiece. No thanks.

I decided to try cleaning the print heads, something Canon didn't think necessary since the test came out OK. I tried printing my picture on plain 24# paper. Voila. No banding.

You might think that means the problem is solved.

But wait.

I decided to try printing on photo paper. I started with HP Premium Plus paper, and set up the driver for pro (rather than plain) paper. Well, I didn't get any banding. what I did get was a mostly black and white print. There was a little yellow in appropriate places. But the blue sky and other colors were rendered in B&W. I tried another paper and another paper setting. And I made sure I had not accidentally clicked on some B&W setting someplace. Same result, though. Black & white.

A. Has anyone seen this problem on an S9000, or on any printer? What did you do about it?

B. What is a good color printer that is economical to run, reliable, and interfaces well with a Mac?

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

You need a new printing head; I was able to get it on eB@y a few years ago after some exhaustive searching. The part number is "QY6-0039-000".

It was around $70, which, imo, is cheaper than buying a comparable printer replacement. If you can get it from Canon themselves, expect the price to be close to $100.

 

[Rob-F]

How do you change a printing head? Where is it?

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

It's actually the thing in which you put the ink cartridges; it has an orange tab. It is remarkably simple to remove (you have to remove all the cartridges first).

http://www.crc-tasktron.co.uk/index.php?app=ecom&ns=prodshow&ref=39

 

[Rob-F]

Update: some good news. I tried printing a couple of pictures from iPhoto, rather than Aperture. Other than having to lighten them, because they were printing too dark at first, they were fine!

So. I think there is something wrong with the driver they had me download. IPhoto uses a different driver. I don't know if that driver is part of iPhoto, or part of the iMac. Whatever it is, it works. It seems Canon's telephone "help" did me more harm than good. I need to figure out how to delete this Canon driver, and get back the one I had. There was nothing wrong with it, I just needed to perform a head cleaning!

Should I delete the driver they had me download, and look for the original CD disk that came with the printer? There have been several updates provided by Apple since I loaded that disk, but even without the updates, it's bound to work better than what they sent me.