Avian’s Blog

Recently I noticed some unusual red dots and lines on the printouts from my Epson L310. It was interesting because it seemed like extra dots were getting added to the paper. This is just the opposite of the usual problem of clogged nozzles. In that case, dots (or whole lines) are missing on the paper. The extra dots also looked well-defined and didn't look like ink was just getting smudged onto the paper by a dirty print head.

I've ran the nozzle check using escputil -n and this is how the test area looks like:

It looks like one magenta nozzle is spewing ink at an angle. At first I thought it was an electrical problem and somehow one nozzle got shorted to another. But this looks more like the ink from that nozzle gets deposited onto the paper a bit to the top and left from where it should be. The line from that nozzle looks a bit more blurry than the other ones, which also suggests that something is interfering with the ink flow.

I don't remember seeing something like that before. Anyway, I just thought that was interesting. So far it didn't bother me too much and maybe it will go away during printer's regular self-cleaning cycles. If it doesn't fix itself I'll probably try to clean it up manually.