Is it "normal" for an injet to combine magenta with black when printing black?

Discussion in 'Small Format Inkjet Printers' started by sumguy, Mar 5, 2014.

  1. sumguy

    sumguy New Member

    Joined:
    Mar 2014
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    Location:
    Toronto
    I have a Canon Pixma IP1600 that has been used for several years to print faceplate graphics for electronic instrumentation on glossy photo paper which is then laminated and glued to the aluminum front plate of the instrumentation. The design is done in Coreldraw 9 and involve some shading (fountain fills) and solid colors. The printer has 2 tanks - one is black and the other is color (cyan/magenta/yellow).

    I've always bought new canon ink cartridges for this printer - we don't do a lot of high-quality color printing with it. But recently when we needed to run a print, I went out and had had the color cartridge refilled, and yes the printer did complain about not knowing the status of the color tank and I pressed the button on the printer to ignore the status so now the printer driver doesn't report the color ink levels but some diagnostic software I got from the internet does seem to work and tell me the levels.

    Anyways, what I'm finding is that when I select plain paper, everything that should be black or a shade of black does seem to be printed with only the black ink. But if I select glossy photo paper, anything that is black or a shade of black is printed with black ink and also a layer of magenta, giving a slight purple tinge to the output. If I interrupt the print job by lifting the cover of the printer, I can see that on the last pass it just put down magenta where it should only be black, so I caught the printer in the act of combining magenta + black in areas that in the Corel design should just be 100% black.

    I don't have a lot of previous examples of this current graphic design showing correct 100% black printed on heavy glossy paper because this is a new design, but I do have one example, and for all I know it could be correct only because the magenta was empty for that print job.

    So I want to know if on these cheap consumer-grade printers (Canon in this case) if it's normal for the printer to combine magenta + black when using anything other than plain paper and the printer is doing it's best (highest quality) printing. A secondary question would be - is this effect I'm seeing the result of refilling the color cartridge and I wouldn't see it if I was using an original (unmolested) OEM cartridge.