Printer Tip: Cleaning your Print Heads the Cheap&Smart Way

If you use the printer's internal cleaning utils (if they are available for Linux at all), you are likely to lose a lot of ink down the drain. And you usually can't even chose which color to clean. But can do it much cheaper:

1. Open GIMP.
2. Create a new full size page (e.g. A4 or Letter).
3. Change the foreground colour to the color that's making the problem. Use the CMYK color picker and you can e.g. just pcik Yellow or Magenta, which your printer uses. I had a problem with yellow. See the "Y" on 100% on the left side.
4. Fill the entire page with the chosen foreground color.
5. If you can, go to the printer settings,
6. set the Quality to the Highest setting.
7. set the Malfunctioning Color e.g. +50.
8. set the maximum dpi.
9. Print the page, better twice in a row, that's more efficient unless there's just a minor skip in the color. Then keep printing single pages until the color comes back nicely.

Worked great on my Canon MP610! And it does not only save ink from the colors you spare the cleaning, it usually also saves ink from the color your cleaning. Also the ink goes onto the paper and not somewhere in the spongue inside your printer, that has a limited size. And that sponge is known to be the first part to cause problems in Canon printers: At some point it's reported as full and the printer stops working. (You can reset the print counter, but then ink might come out of your printer at some point.)

Canon Printer Tips

Did you know there are original Linux driver from Canon? Now you know that, why not get the hacked and enhanced version.

Canon Printer Problem "pstocanonij write error,32" Solved

I just had the error message

"pstocanonij write error,32."

when trying to print something with the Original Canon Printer Driver and my MP610. It turned out I needed to cancel the job. I printed a test page and then I printed the same thing again and it worked just fine. Sometimes it hangs up and I have to turn if off and on again.

But I still have no idea why he's cleaning his inks several times a day currently...

Update:

The error comes up more and more often now and I haven't found a real fix yet. It might be related to certain settings. The printer prints one page and then stops printing.

FIX:

You can either use a different driver (e.g. the gutenprint one), or it may be an incorrect page border setting. In my experience, changing the page border settings back to their original settings (31,75mm) fixed the problems. You may have to reboot your computer and turn the printer off and on again for it to work again.

FIX2:
It might also be that your /tmp directory is full. This happens especially when you're using the special tmpfs on that directory, as some distributions automatically do. Or, of course, if you're main partition is out of space.

Correct Ink Printer Usage

No matter if you use your printer under Linux or Windows, there's a couple things you should do to extend your printers life time and reduce your ink usage:

1. Keep the Printer connected to the power outlet. (Do turn it off, though.) The energy this costs should be low on any modern printer. And if you disconnect your printer it will most likely clean it's ink tank the next time you turn it on or print something. And cleaning the ink tank once takes a lot of ink.
   
2. Print something in every color at least once a week. This keeps the tank clean and ensures the printer doesn't need to use the ink cleaning program, which uses a lot more ink than most things you will print. The best thing to do it to print the test pattern once a week if nothing else. It usually activates every ink once and has a very low ink usage.
3. Use printing modes like "draft" for uninportant things. They are not only faster, they also use much less ink. Also use your printer's duplex feature if it has one. This saves 50% paper and therefore is good for the environment and your wallet. And you can always print several pages on each side of a paper.
   
4. Get your ink cardridges refilled. This is good for the environment, your bank account balance and it doesn't hurt your printer. Sometimes alternative ink is even better than the original one. E.g. Pelican ink works with printers with a chip now and the results are even better than with Canon's original ink.