Question Inkjet Printer Printhead Replacement Process Questions

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C

Crag_Hack

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Dec 25, 2015
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I have an HP Officejet Pro 8025. A while back the printing was subpar with streaks and no amount of printhead cleaning fixed it. I replaced the printhead with this guy then everything was great. The installation instructions said to do a printhead cleaning to make the quality good enough but since the quality was already great I skipped it. Now a couple months later the print quality is subpar again with streaks. Again printhead cleaning doesn't help. My questions are:

  1. Do you think third-party printheads are made to the same quality standards as a genuine HP printhead?
  2. Could skipping the printhead cleaning after replacement have messed things up causing the subpar quality I'm currently seeing?
  3. Should I replace the printhead again with hopefully better luck this time?
 
@USAFRet Thanks as always. I hope the relevant government bodies crack down on this BS some time, it's offensive you can't buy a replacement HP printhead for a 2-3 year old printer.
 
@USAFRet Hmm laserjet then sounds like a perfect solution. Maybe the owner of the printer will let me have a go with another printhead for fun just to see. How do you prime a new printhead? Do you just a round or two of printhead cleaning?
 
Yeah, "priming" a new printhead is just doing a very few head cleanings.

For your poor performance of the new printhead it may well be faulty. But you can try this. Remove that printhead and clean all the electrical contacts on the printhead itself, and in the holder in the printer. A CLEAN common pink pencil eraser is good for this - very mildly abrasive. Make sure to wipe / blow off any residue before re-installing the printhead.
 
@Paperdoc Do you think 3 cleanings should be enough? I am replacing the printhead again tomorrow. Will clean the contacts at the same time.

@USAFRet Amusingly there is no manual for my printer through HP, apparently I don't have sufficient permissions to post on the HP support community, and HP phone support said they didn't have instructions for priming since my printer did not have a user-serviceable printhead. Bunch of bologna.

Thanks guys!
 
Here's another idea. I found this video in which the guy demonstrates using an ink head cleaning kit. Basically it is a kit of a cleaning solution and a syringe / hose set. You can use the syringe to force solution through through each colour section of the head separately, hoping to dissolve any dried up ink crud in the head and flush it out of the nozzles.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHJtM0rH8qw


I am a bit confused though. The video claims to show how to do with your printer. BUT the demo does NOT indicate you could have removed the head from the printer to do the job! You obviously did since you replaced the head entirely. Moreover, the head in the video appears visually NOT to be what you say you used as a replacement.

Whatever! The principle is the same. If you DO remove your head from your printer, you could do this flush process outside with no risk of soaking the printer innards. I suspect the "secret sauce" here is the cleaning solution supplied with the kit - NOT likely to be simple pure water! And of course, this is a promo video, so we cannot know how reliable this cleaning process is.
 
In the last few years, HP moved to a fixed-head model like Epson, where while technically the printhead is a part that could be removed and replaced, it can only be properly aligned at a factory service center if disturbed, so replacement is not considered a DIY job. So while you could probably find a C2P18-30001 / C2P18A printhead at a parts house that sold printer repair parts rather than just supplies, the onboard fine alignment utility probably isn't good enough to actually align it properly.

HP of course is famous for the opposite: it pioneered the disposable printhead that was cheap enough to include in every ink cartridge. The printhead nozzles are fabricated on silicon wafers like how CPUs and GPUs are, and no refurbisher in the world is going to invest $100M in a chipmaking factory to make their own printheads. So all "refurbished" or "new compatible" printheads are simply used OE printheads that have gone through a deep cleaning process--they wouldn't be $30 otherwise. And it appears HP has gone to some lengths to discourage this by engineering their heads to shatter if ultrasonically cleaned, explaining all of the warnings not to do that when attempting to clear clogs. So a used head may be worn out + made worse by an aggressive cleaning procedure, or you might get lucky so it may still be OK and might end up aligned well enough.

Clogging was way less of an issue with the old dye inks rather than the pigment inks used nowadays.
 
A printhead should come full of ink, and your printer is not new so the lines between the ink cartridges and printhead should also be full of ink and thus not require priming. However if you have left the cartridge or printhead out long enough for that ink to solidify, then it may well still print OK--until the printhead runs out of ink as it can't draw any more from the cartridge.

Those videos push a bunch of cleaning solution through the printhead from the top which would cause light printing until that solution was all replaced with ink. I would be more concerned that the refurbisher may have instead forced solution up from the bottom to save on ink as then the dislodged clogs would be floating around in the printhead to clog things again later. Or perhaps it's just the cheap 3rd-party ink they filled the printhead with--could even have been for piezo and not thermal printers if they were only interested in selling you a printhead-shaped object.

If you were having that many problems with clogging on new genuine HP printheads, then I would suspect the rubber seal the head parks on when not in use isn't sealing air out properly, whether from lint/dog hair or just not being flat. You could try cleaning that or just workaround the problem by printing at least 1 full color page per day.
 
Dye versus pigment inks is a debate in terms of print quality. Pigment inks tend to produce more intense colours / opaque printed characters, but they do lead to clogged ink jets more easily. The issue is more important for Black ink. For many colours ink density is not so critical and varies a lot to produce all the huge range of colours and shades. In colours, Black is used as a "neutral colour" intensifier in lesser amounts - more like adding shades of grey. But for TEXT we usually want VERY dark sharp text and pigment ink works better. I had a Canon printer years ago that had FIVE ink carts - three colours plus black as dyes, and one pigment Black for really dark tones and text. The pigment Black cartridge was much larger since most prints have much more text than colours.

In most ink-jet printers, the Head Clean tool just forces a LOT more ink than used for normal printing though each colour jet set while the head is position off-sheet on an absorbent pad. This flushes minute particles through and off the jet openings. The Prime tool does much the same thing but may push more ink through because it is trying to push air bubbles through the entire tubing and head jet system, so it MAY work like a super-clean tool. But it does use up a LOT of expensive ink. Real problems (maybe what OP is experiencing) occur when ink components (pigment particles or dried dye) accumulate and stick to one spot so securely they cannot be flushed by fluid flow.

If I were to try the head cleaning procedure in the video I linked above, I would be concerned about leaving the head jet system full of cleaning solution. To me it is obvious I would want to blot the head and remove as much of that as possible, then do a Prime run - or 2 or 3 or 4 - to get all that cleaner out and replaced with good ink.

In my case, I had lots of problems with ink jets because I don't print a lot and heads did dry and clog. I am now on my second colour laser printer which never does that.
 
Dye also has a wider gamut than pigment, so fewer colors were needed for equivalent image quality. Not that it matters nowadays when you can no longer easily obtain the swellable papers that dye needed to look its best anymore, so it's more a historical footnote.

More colors means up to 12 ink cartridges and printheads per printer, truly a win-win for the printer manufacturers. Especially when you consider the easier clogging and higher wasted ink from all the cleaning cycles required, and given how nobody has ever developed a third-party pigment ink as fade-resistant as OEM pigment.
 
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