Magenta dropping out of soft orange areas?

[russelltatedotcom]

Hi Guys, I am running an Epson Stylus Pro9800 large format printer to print out large flat colour illustrated posters.
Today for some reason I noticed a big shift in colour on my soft orange areas?
The colour shifts to either a lemon yellow or various shades of plain yellow.
The strange thing is Red is OK and even strong oranges are OK, but when some orange shades get too soft it almost seems like the magenta is dropping out?

I've done nozzle test/clean and replaced light Magenta and Magenta Carts but still getting same problem.
I work in Illustrator producing vector work but even a placed raster image in my files produces the same results

Anybody got any ideas where the problem may lie and how I can fix it?

Appreciate any help

Russell

 

[Johu]

Well Russell, you told that you have cleaned and printed the tests but you say nothing about how the tests look like. I mean judging from the problem description you have a problem with light magenta color. In red you have magenta and in lighter colors like orange the machine most likely uses light magenta. You could of course test this by creating a yellow box and do a magenta vignette on top of that box. If the vignette is not produced smoothly then there is your problem.
The solution is another matter. You could (again) do a magenta vignette mark few spots with the respective percentage so that you would have some sort of an idea in which area the problem lies. While having discovered that create a box with the darkest magenta value you had problems. Try to print that alone and see if it will start getting better or worse.
The problem is that it could be the nozzles, pump, control chip... Nozzles are the probably the only problem you could be able to solve by yourself.

 

[russelltatedotcom]

Magenta

Magenta

Hey John, thanks for your reply. I did narrow down the magenta to anything under a 60% tint of magenta. On a test strip 50% magenta came out as 15% …cyan!

I changed the cartridges for magentas and went back to Epson ones. I printed another 6 A2 test sheets before, everything came good again.
I don't know how much ink sits in the tubes between cartridge and print head but with the amount of ink I used on those 6 sheets I would have sure that the new ink would have flushed through a lot sooner than it did. So I can't deduce if the Ink was the problem or whether the problem just "fixed itself"
Fingers crossed it does not start happening again!

Cheers
RT

 

[Johu]

Hi Russell,
I am glad that it all worked out. My experience is that the tubes contain about 0.4-0.5 sqm worth of ink. If you were not using the original inks that could have been the cause. I have experience with 3rd party inks and none have worked as well as the originals. But I have to admit that my last experience was about 5-6 years ago, so I am not sure whether todays compatible inks are better. Anyway it's good that things are working now.

The 60% magenta is still mostly (if not toally) light magenta and your experience with 50% mag coming out 15% cyan is not that odd if you were using the driver with color management on. I am usually always printing via rip so if I want pure magenta I can get only magenta.