Testing an Inkjet Printer Using Purge Patterns

If you have ever struggled to get your printer to print perfectly, without banding, this information may help you.

Inkjet nozzles are very small, about 1/3 the diameter of a human hair. Hard to see with the naked eye. On the bottom of the cartridge or print head there is a bank of nozzles (16, 32, 64 or more) for each color. If one or more of these nozzles are blocked, you will see skipping or bands of white on your printouts.

This is not good. Not only will the white bands (no ink) be objectionable, but the blended ink colors will not come out right. The printer only has base color to work with (cyan, magenta, yellow, black in a 4 color printer). All the other 16 million colors are from blending these base colors. If some of the nozzles in the print head are blocked, the colors will be off, sometimes way off.

Okay, so what to do to get them unblocked.

There are a number of techniques which can be found in our Knowledgebase. Before going into the more complicated methods. Try this first.

1. Go to the Printers and Faxes page found in the Control panel on a PC. Mac's have a similar page. Right click on Properties, and find the Maintenance section for your printer.

2. Run a cleaning cycle, then print the nozzle pattern or test pattern that is suggested. If it does not look right, ie.. banding, then do it again.

3. Don't do this more than 3 times. A cleaning cycle is aggressive suction, and can cause ink foam to build up in the print head nozzles.

4. If your test patterns look different each time, this indicates that the nozzles are not permanently blocked, just starved for ink, or they may have air trapped on top of them or inside them. Air is the enemy. Permanent blockage means you need a new print head or some aggressive cleaning. (See knowledge base.)

5. After a couple of cleaning cycles, try printing some of our purge patterns. Purge patterns are nothing more than vertical rectangles of each base color.

6. If the problems are not solved, try a new cartridge. Be sure that air can enter the top of the cartridge. Most inkjet cartridges are vented on the top by a serpentine groove under the label that leads to a vent hole. New ones have a pull-tab that must be pulled before using.

7. On Canon cartridges, make sure the soft sponge material at the ink exit is not pushed up into the cartridge. Pull it back or pry it back toward the outside, so it is flush with the bottom of the cartridge. This is a common problem with Canon printers.

Hopefully doing these things will bring your printer back to a healthy condition. If not, wait over night and try some more testing the next day. This gives trapped air and ink foam a chance to disappear or move away.

If nothing seems to work. You can try talking with the Manufacturer's tech support, but don't hold our breath for a solution. They may not have the answer. If it is a new printer, use the warranty, and get a new one.

All of our purge files can be downloaded from our Download Page. You will have to unzip the zip file to get them after the download. If you don't need them all, a pdf file is linked to each of the images below. The pdf's can be easily printed.

There is one file for each color and a multicolor file for 4, 6, 7 and 8 color printers in the download.

4, 6, 7 Color Purge Patterns - click to view and print
(Requires Adobe Reader)

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