The touchstone of the photographer’s art.

Its been quite a while since I made glossy prints. In the darkroom days I would squeegee the print, face down, onto a high gloss sheet of chrome-plated steel then heat the thing in a press. If you got things right the resulting print would emerge with an indescribably high gloss (this was before awful RC papers ruined traditional printing) which was also quite incredibly fragile. Any moisture or fingerprints and the surface would be ruined. But the definition afforded the image was beyond compare.

This was not all good, of course. Every imperfection in the image was disclosed, every grain of Kodak’s unbeatable TriX emulsion revealed. Sometimes you wanted that. Sometimes not. And the whole process was a real pain in the nether regions but once you saw an unglazed, normally dried glossy print you never wanted to go there again.

Nearly all the many prints I have made on my HP DesignJet 90 dye ink jet printer have been on HP-branded Premium Plus Satin paper. This paper has a semi-gloss finish, retains detail well and is very easy to use. It has a swellable surface, meaning its pores open when sprayed with ink to absorb the dyes. After a few hours the swelling subsides and the print is less fragile and can be handled easily. Until then the surface is quite fragile. I always handle paper using cotton gloves because any grease from fingers on the surface can result in poor ink absorption, blotchiness and reduced life. Done carefully, HP’s Vivera inks are certified by Wilhelm Research for some 80 years longevity.

Well, take a look what arrived on my doorstep the other day:

Nice things happen to nice people.

The buyer of a hefty chunk of my Canon 5D outfit found several goodies in the shipments I made. A few CF cards, a wired and wireless remote, an LCD protector, a CF-to-SDHC adapter and so on. He had been a pleasure to deal with, none of the usual game playing or nickel and dime nonsense so beloved of buyers of even fairly priced gear, that I felt it was the least I could do. Well, Barry B. dropped me a note saying that he no longer made prints and would I like some HP Glossy? Is the Pope a Catholic? It gets better. The small fortune in printing paper is not only the swellable type specific to my HP DesignJet, it was shipped to me at no charge! There are decent people left in the world …. thank you, Barry.

On receipt the first thing I did was to download the paper profile from HP and make it available to Lightroom. Then I took an image which would really benefit from the ability of glossy paper to render fine detail and ran a test print. In this image I had retouched some overhead wires using Photoshop CS5 and Content Aware Fill and it looked just fine on my Dell 2209WA display. But, oh! boy, the test print clearly displayed my retouching so I had to go back into PS and try harder. That’s glossy paper for you. Every imperfection, every pore, every blemish, is writ large to the world.

A second print – I have no fewer than 125 sheets of 13″ x 19″ to play with so I’m feeling a tad profligate – put all to rights and the quality is simply breathtaking. And this from the Panny G1’s poncy little MFT sensor!

A warning. Before these swellable papers dry, a matter of a few hours, they will show a mottled surface reflecting (!) disparate ink absorption across the surface. Give them a few hours and the surfaces returns to normal, meaning a high gloss almost as good as those monochrome prints from ages ago, but a lot easier to make.

Glossy is not for everyone. It’s hard to display, attracting reflections as it does. It’s fragile and really needs mounting behind glass. It’s unforgiving when it comes to the photographer’s technique. And it needs to be handled with kid gloves …. OK, cotton gloves. But, done right and displayed right, a glossy print remains the touchstone of the photographer’s art.

Why do you think that nice Mr. Jobs insists on those dumb glossy screens on all his computers? Because they plain look better on a casual acquaintance. That’s fine for prints. Not so good for computer screens.

HP Glossy is anything but water resistant, so keep it away from rain drops and the like:

Two minutes under a tap and the emulsion starts to run.

Using the right profile.

I’m really not a black and white guy, having last seriously used the medium in 1979. Still, now and then I make a monochrome print from a color original, using the ‘B & W’ option in Lightroom’s Develop module. This is well engineered as you can still vary the mix of the original colors using the sliders for each, and can easily alternate between color and monochrome renditions to gauge the effect.

The dye ink HP DesignJet printers are renowned for the outstanding depth of their black inks with no bronzing on HP Premium Plus Satin Photo paper. Read on to get the best black and white rendition possible, short of paying up for custom profiles.

Using the stock Premium Plus Photo Satin color profile a monochrome print from my DesignJet 90 is too cold. I mostly prefer a slightly warm rendition, so I set about finding dedicated monochrome profiles for this fine paper.

HP still offers free downloads of icc paper profiles from its website for black and white printing and warn that these should not be used for color prints as the results may be unpredictable.

Click below to download these:

Click to download HP monochrome profiles.

There are many to choose from. Basically you experiment until you find the profile that suits your tastes. The download includes instructions for Photoshop but you can readily adapt these to Lightroom.

After downloading, I installed the HP neutral profiles by dragging and dropping the downloaded folder to Username->Library->Colorsync->Profiles. I printed the test print (named Neutral_Profiles,jpg and to be found in the ‘Index_profiles’ folder in the download) using Snow Leopard and Lightroom, and telling LR to use the Neutral 0 profile.

As luck would have it that one gave me the result I wanted, viewed by daylight, warmer than the stock color profile and just right for my taste, so I renamed the Localized Description String as explained here in the ‘Neutral 0’ profile to HP 90 Neutral 0, and checked it off, along with the regular color profile in the Print module of LR (you can also see the other B & W profiles which I did not rename in this screenshot):

Now when I go to the profile selector in LR I see:

It takes less time to do than to explain and is a worthwhile step for best black and white print quality. You can use any one of the many profiles to suit your preference. I like life simple, so I only use the two profiles above with HP Premium Satin photo paper.

Finding faulty heads.

For the HP DesignJet six head dye ink 30/90/130 printers and their four head predecessors (10, 70, 120, etc.) HP recommends running its Image Quality Diagnostics Page using the System Management Utility when you experience print quality issue; the Utility can only be run for Mac users using OS Leopard or earlier. That’s a shame as HP has committed to stocking repair parts, heads, inks etc. for 10 years after the printer is discontinued, and as they still sell the DJ130 on their site that means through 2021 at least. Too bad their Mac software is obsolete, requiring an earlier Mac OS or a Windows PC.

When the DesignJet has a faulty printhead the front panel indicator for the head is meant to flash. The problem is that it does not always do so.

Here’s a print I was making the other day; all was proceeding swimmingly until the last few inches on the right of the 13″ x 19″ original, where the color suddenly goes awry. The image below is a low quality photograph of the 13″ x 19″ print as my scanner does not go beyond 8 1/2″ x 11″!

Prining problem with the DesignJet.

This problem is not unknown to DesignJet users and generally indicates a clogged or faulty head. However, there was no indication on the printer’s front panel of any problem and the first Image Quality Diagnostics Page report I ran showed all the color squares at the top to be solid and full.

However, because sometimes a head can temporarily recover from a clog, I simply ran the report again and the problem was now disclosed clearly, as follows:

Faulty head disclosed.

Consulting this chart from HP ….

…. I immediately concluded that the Cyan head was at fault. Rather than try and clean it, I simply ordered a replacement as the original was over 1,100 days old. Further I have found cleaning to be a quixotic exercise which rarely fixes a printhead problem for long. While HP states that the smaller color squares are merely for warm-up before printing the head alignment grids to their right, the total absence of Cyan in the related small square confirmed my conclusion, suggesting that the little color squares have some value after all.

Also, note that HP’s statement that “All patches associated with a given color must have banding, for the corresponding printhead do be determined at fault” is incorrect in my experience. As you can see, Cyan affects squares A2, A3 and B3, yet only A3 and B3 disclose banding, above. After many print head replacements, I have never seen three banded patches and five of the six cartridges – all except Black (K) – affect three patches each. I have had all five of Y, C, LC, M and LM fail and in each case the report only disclosed two banded patches.

The LC, LM and Y ink cartridges are much larger than the K, C and M ones, meaning that on average HP expects prints to use more LC, LM and Y ink. Yet with all my non-black heads failing it seems that volume of ink use is not the driving factor. Mine were all over 1,100 days old so age may be the deciding issue for light users. Whether age of the ink is relevant I have yet to determine. Some of my ink cartridges are past their expiration date.

After changing the Cyan printhead I placed three sheets of plain letter sized paper in the DJ; the DJ automatically runs a head alignment when a head is replaced and will do so up to three times. A check mark on my first and only page confirmed all was well, and printing was restarted.

The Ink Consumable Usage report section:

But wait a moment, you say. I just checked the Ink Consumable Report on the two page Information Report I ran from my DesignJet. It says that all is well as my head has only used up a fraction of its life.

Oh yeah?

The unhelpful Ink Consumed Printhead data for the old LC head.

Well, right after I replaced the Cyan head, above, and made one print, the Light Cyan head blew! Yet the report, above, says the LC head was only 18% through its life (green oval). That statistic is useless, it seems, for old heads. Read further down and you will see that the LC head is no less than 1,117 days old! Now I have only the ancient K (Black) head left to blow. The K head is a model 84, all the others are 85, so I’m running it until it drops, hoping that any design difference will help. As a minimum it will be an interesting discovery process. And it’s still cheaper to waste a sheet of paper than buy a new head. Moral of this story? Old heads are likely to fail even if modestly used. Keep spares.

Am I complaining? Not really. After four years of sitting there, mostly inactive, I can hardly grumble about a $35 head failure.

All is once again well. Now I have to make a lot more prints to bring down my average cost per print – logic akin to that of the US Government spending more money on its war machine to keep down the cost of oil.

Flagmakers, San Francisco. G1, kit lens @ 29mm, 1/500, f/5,2, ISO320.

Note on the picture: The original was taken in a dark alley with insufficient room for square composition and is surpassingly bland. A few seconds in Lightroom and a round trip to Photoshop to fix leaning verticals, and the power of RAW is writ large in allowing me to restore some color to the original.

The original of Flagmakers.

Using Snow Leopard.

Why soft proof?

I have mentioned this before but it bears repeating. Soft proofing – meaning previewing on your display what a print will look like with the paper profile of your choice – is easy with Snow Leopard and Lightroom. If you want to get an accurate preview of how your print will look without wasting printing paper and time, you need to soft proof. (Click here for the earlier OS Tiger version of this piece.)

Even outstanding technical writers like Martin Evening (in his LR3 book) say that you cannot soft proof when using Lightroom! Others would have you generate a print file and then open it in Photoshop for soft proofing. Yet others want to sell you a Lightroom plugin for soft proofing.

Well, read on for Dr. P’s free version.

Monitor profiling:

What follows presumes you have a well profiled display in the first place. I recommend the Eye One colorimeter, but be warned the software with which it currently ships will not run with Mac OS X Lion, shortly to replace Snow Leopard. If your display is not profiled you are wasting your time. I profile my three displays monthly – they all drift over time and as most display screens are made by LG, Sony or Samsung, chances are your display drifts too regardless of the label on its case. I address a workaround to allow you to continue using xrite’s dated software once OS Lion comes along here.

You want to profile your display in much the same ambient light as you will be viewing your print, and colorimeters like the Eye One allow you to measure ambient light. The reason is simple. If you profile your display in daylight then view the print in incandescent light, your viewing light temperature (much yellower) is dramatically different from your profiling light temperature (much bluer). You are not comparing like with like.

Don’t believe me.

Take a print and walk around your home with it – from a bright room illuminated by daylight to one illuminated by incandescent light. The changes in perceived color are anything but subtle. The light you profile by is especially important for the accurate rendition of skin tones of loved ones, where visual memory is most acute. (Sort of like judging a sound system – listen to opera or lieder, because we know how the voice sounds). If your portrait is to be viewed by incandescent light then your display should be profiled in like lighting if soft proofing is going to make any sense. Professional proofing stations recognize this by providing a temperature controlled light source.

The GTI EVS-1SP – 29 x 52″ – Graphiclite D5000 Viewing System
– for when your ship comes in. $6,000 from your friendly dealer.

Very large devices like this will house two monitors and your print!

Using Lightroom:

In the Print module of Lightroom (I’m using Lightroom 3 in what follows), make sure that in the Print Job->Color Management pane, Lightroom is NOT set to ‘Managed by Printer’. You want Lightroom to take care of color management, meaning it will pass the print job through your paper profile of choice before you spool the job out to your printer.

To confirm you have done this right, click ‘Print’ in Lightroom’s print module, then click Color Options in the lower drop down menu and you should see the following:

Color Options in Lightroom.

Select the appropriate paper profile in Lightroom:

Lightroom is set to take care of color management duties.
The profile for the paper of choice has been selected, above.

Using Apple’s Preview:

After selecting the paper profile for your paper of choice as shown above, click on ‘Preview’:

Printer and quality selected in red circled boxes.
Preview button clicked next in the green circled box.

After clicking on ‘Preview’, your Mac will open the Preview application, displaying your print file.

Click on ‘View->Soft Proof with Profile’ and then mouse or arrow down to your paper profile – the one you chose in LR3 will be highlighted. Click on it and you are seeing a preview of your print with the profile of choice applied.

Paper profile selected in Preview.

Apple mentions this Preview capability in passing on its web site.

From Apple’s web site.

If you do not like the colors, go back into Lightroom, reprocess and try again. Otherwise click ‘Print’ and you are done.

The effect of paper profiles:

In the following screen snap I have illustrated how paper profiles clearly affect Print Preview – the left is with HP Premium Plus Satin, the right with Arches Infinity which is far ‘warmer’; the difference is clearly visible on my Dell 2209WA display:

The effect of different paper profiles in Preview.

Orange umbrella. G1, kit lens.
By using soft proofing I was able to get the the colors I wanted
in the print without wasting printing time and paper.

Hopefully, one day Adobe will add the soft proofing capability to Lightroom so that soft proofs can be viewed from within Lightroom, but it’s not like it’s a big deal to do this using Preview.

Note for HP DesignJet 30/90/130 users:

The HP DJ 30/90/130 printers have an internal colorimeter which will generate a profile for any paper of your choice, storing that profile in the printer’s ROM. While many of the DJ’s functions can be activated with front panel pushbutton sequences, color profile generation cannot. You must run the HP DesignJet Maintenance Utility which, for reasons only know to some twit at HP, resides on HP’s servers and cannot be run locally from your computer. To make matters worse, you cannot run this Utility using OS Snow Leopard or Lion. To generate the profile you must insert a letter sized piece of the paper of your choice, run OS Leopard or prior, make sure you have an internet connection, pray that HP’s servers are not down, load their System Maintenance Utility, and the profile will be generated and stored by the printer. You can confirm generation of the paper profile by running the Information Pages from the printer and looking for this:

HP Satin paper profile generated on March 4, 2011.

The pidgin English reference to ‘The greater PQ’ means the profile you will be using when you select ‘Best’ in this drop down box; ‘Best’ forces the DJ into one directional printing for highest quality, but is slower than ‘Normal’ which uses bi-directional printing. I always use ‘Best’:

I have saved these settings in an LR Preset named ‘HP Satin Best’, as shown above.

If you adopt this paper profiling approach, then to use the profile generated by the DesignJet’s colorimeter you would elect ‘Color managed by Printer’ in the Lightroom Print pane – see the second screenshot in this piece, above. In practice I find no significant difference in colors on the print whether printed using the DJ’s ROM profile or the ‘icc’ profile which resides on my HackPro’s disk drive. However, as the use of icc profiles is not limited to just six papers (which is all the DJ’s ROM has room for) and because you cannot rename the ROM profiles to something other than the names provided by HP, using an on disk profile gives you far more paper choices and makes those easy to select – the names are obvious. Finally, letting the printer manage color takes away the ability to soft proof the image on your display before hitting ‘Print’.

Later HP wide format printers – the ‘Z’ series – are much smarter; they also cost three times as much as a DesignJet. The Z3100, as an example, has an Eye One colorimeter built in! The Z series uses pigment inks as opposed to the dyes use in the 30/90/130 DesignJet. The six printheads used for the twelve inks each cost $70, twice as much as those in the 30/90/130 DesignJets. The Z3100’s colorimeter creates an icc profile for any paper of your choice then stores it on your computer’s hard drive. Neat.

B&H still lists the DesignJet 130R (presumably the ‘R’ indicates inclusion of the roll feed attachment) for a stunning bargain price – there is no cheaper way to get into top quality large printing:

I discuss use of non-HP papers and profiles here and here.

Frustrations and fixes.

Background:

Let me warn you that resurrecting an HP DesignJet printer from cold storage makes a date with Sophia Loren a piece of cake by comparison. After the lovely Sophia has turned up two hours late, wants a change of venue and has thrown a shoe or two at you, things go swimmingly well as you gaze into her lovely brown eyes and luxuriate in the prospect of her gorgeous lips on yours. But try resurrecting an HP DJ, by comparison – and it is every bit the exemplar of its caste as Sophia is of hers – and before you know it you will be the one using bad language and generally throwing things in frustration. Having just gone through that process (the HP, that is, not the date with Sophia) you would not be surprised to find some bad language in what follows.

The problems discussed below are by no means unique to the DesignJet. Use a printer as infrequently as I do and you will inevitably run into problems. These devices have many moving parts, some with very tight tolerances (like printhead jets) and occasional use does not help keep things running smoothly. Unlike a monochrome laser printer, color inkjet printers will give you trouble and they will need maintenance.

It’s a couple of years since I wrote about head cleaning for the HP Designjet 30/90/130 wide carriage ink jet dye printers. (A much improved piece, dated April, 2023, appears here). My HP DJ90 is capable of making quite outstanding prints and the Vivera dyes used in the ink cartridges come with an 80+ year life. My latest box of paper from HP says that Wilhelm Research certifies the paper to be fade proof for 82 years when used with HP Vivera inks. So if the print I gave you fades, sue me. I’ll long have been fertilizer.

Here’s an update of my recent experiences with the DJ90 (18″) and everything here should apply likewise to the smaller DJ30 (13″) and the larger DJ130 (24″). This line of printers may have been discontinued for a couple of years now but parts, ink and paper remain available and the small footprint of the machine and its excellent print quality make the effort of maintenance and repair worthwhile. A replacement will be well over $1,000 for the larger variants (a 24″ current model HP starts at $3,500 whereas Amazon still lists new DJ130 models for under $800 delivered – talk of a bargain!) and while the newer machines use allegedly even more fade proof pigment inks (dyes soak into the paper, pigments rest on it, so paper choice is important) you are dealing with a whole new world of hurt when the replacement inevitably fails. And it will.

The 24″ DJ130 remains available new – a tremendous bargain.

So for me it’s a case of ‘Better the devil you know’, and have you ever tried moving and installing one of these behemoths? I would stick with the non-roll capable model illustrated above (rolls of paper are a pain to mount, align and uncurl after printing) and the network capable one is a waste of money if you use a Mac as you can network a regular model using just the capabilities of OS X. The poor ratings at Amazon seem largely concentrated on problems with paper rolls. I have had no issues using the front loading paper tray.

Snow Leopard:

Mac OS X Snow Leopard changed the way printer drivers are installed. Instead of coming with a bunch of drivers with the operating system, SL determines the make and model of your printer and goes out to the web to download the appropriate driver. That’s nice, as it means less clutter on your hard drive, but the problem with SL is that it no longer permits the HP Maintenance Utility to work. HP has stated they will not be updating their Utility for SL. However, if you follow the front panel button press sequences illustrated earlier, and repeated below, you can get most of the functionality of that Utility without running any software, which is just as well as the software sucked even when you could get it to load from HP’s crappy servers; the alternative is to run maintenance tasks through Windows but life is too short to go there:

However, there are two snags with HP’s diagnostic and maintenance routines:

• Faulty heads are detected and reported sequentially, one at a time. If you have more than one faulty head, only the first one is reported. Replace it and the next faulty one is reported. And yes, I have homicidal feelings towards the engineer who designed it that way.
• The push button sequence above will not work until all your heads are reported as working properly, so until they are, you cannot run the head flush (‘printhead recovery’ in HP-speak) sequences. Now I’m loading my Dirty Harry Magnum 44, ‘The Most Powerful Handgun Made’, and searching out the SOB who designed it that way.

Paper and ink choice:

The DesignJet uses ink dyes so the paper you use must be capable of absorbing these. Not all papers are absorbent, so either buy HP paper or look for paper which works with HP Inks #58, #72, #84 or #85. The DesignJet uses the last two. Alternatively look for paper which specifies suitability for HP DeskJet 9300 DeskJet 9600, HP Photosmart 8750 or HP DesignJet T1100, T610, 30, 90 or 130.

I always use HP ink cartridges (HP 84 C5016 Black, HP 85: C9425A Cyan, C9426A Magenta, C9427A Yellow, C9428A Light Cyan, C9429A Light Magenta) as I believe the savings from refilled cartridges do not outweigh the risk of using unknown inks. Further, the DesignJet is a very frugal user of ink. There are also aftermarket continuous flow ink systems with high capacity ink tanks for high volume printing but I have no experience of those.

Paper profiles:

Everything you need to know about profiling paper for your DesignJet with Lightroom appears here.

Frankly, your best bet is to use HP Premium Plus Photo Paper – Satin. It’s tested 82 year fade proof and glossy is awful for exhibition use. There are ‘icc’ profiles available from HP specific to this paper and the DesignJet printer. Further, the surface sheen changes little when heat mounted and you know that the inks are being properly absorbed as the paper is made to HP’s specifications. Use something else and you have no certainty of knowing whether the print will fade or not.

HP Support:

Forget about it. It’s useless. Paying for someone who cannot speak English to tell you to reboot your computer is not support. Man up and do it yourself.

Print heads and the cold storage problem:

Leaving the HP Designjet printer unplugged is an extremely bad idea, as my recent experience testifies. The printer was unplugged for a few months while being relocated and when I finally plugged it in, all sorts of problems cropped up. If you switch the printer off but leave it plugged in to the mains the green front panel light will stay on and if you open the ink cartridge drawer cover you will find that the area in the vicinity of the heads is permanently warm. That’s because HP heats the heads even with the printer off to prevent ink drying and clogging. Bottom line is NEVER UNPLUG THE PRINTER FOR ANY PERIOD OF TIME. By all means turn it off with the front panel button but leave it plugged in. The green diode stays on to confirm it’s warming the heads but the fan is off, saving on wear and tear and taking away the noise.

I already knew this but like a fool disregarded that inner voice, (moving is hell), so when I switched it on after a few ‘cold’ months it was hardly a surprise to see the printer reporting a faulty Light Magenta head, evidenced by the blinking symbol on the LCD panel. I get my HP supplies from Atlex and have for years. They have cartridges, heads and the special HP paper for the DJ series, so I ordered a replacement LM head, which was on my doorstep in one day’s time. How they consistently manage this incredibly fast delivery from Illinois to northern California I don’t know but it’s a superb business and you should give them some of yours next time you need HP supplies. They have been around seemingly for ever.

Switching on the printer and opening the head/ink cover, you wait a few seconds while the head assembly moves left then right, open the head cover (toward you, up, away from you) and pull out the old head, pushing in the new. Switch off, fire it up again and …. , now the Magenta head is flashing. So I get mad, pull the Magenta head (it makes no sense to keep six heads on the shelf for an amateur user like me) and hold the swine under a purified water tap for some 15 minutes until the tint of colored water coming out is almost gone. During this process I’m directing the water stream into the orifice on one side of the cartridge, meaning I’m forward-flushing it. Given the minuscule size of the exit jets it’s not realistic to back-flush. Plug it back in and … no joy. I consult the resident Border Terrier who keeps calm and points a very cold nose to the Hackpro, suggesting I stop being silly and order a Magenta head. This I do and one more day and, another $43 later, Atlex delivers again. This time after plugging in and waiting 10 minutes for the DJ90 to grind away as it does its new head thing, all is well and nothing is flashing on the LCD panel. Both the BT and I sigh in relief and I run the Print Head Alignment job, using the button sequence above. I do this three times until I get the tick mark at lower right – the first two runs return an ‘X’ meaning the process has to be repeated. I use plain paper in the DJ90 for this process. I’m not made of money, you know.

Good head alignment print – note the check mark (circled) lower right.

The Yellow Problem:

For some reason the yellow ink is the one most most prone to clogging the supply tube which routes it from the cartridge to the printhead in the DesignJet. It’s not a printhead problem – the LED panel on the DJ continues to report a perfectly fine yellow printhead yet your diagnostic reports show yellow to be faint or missing. The tube is clogged.

There are two options to fix this.

First, print a dozen or so copies of this file on plain paper in your DesignJet. Load it in any app where you can make it fill the page and set ink use to ‘best’ and/or ‘heavy’. You are simply forcing a lot of yellow ink through that clogged tube to try and clear the coronary thrombosis it’s suffering.

Second, if that fails, replace the ink tube assembly using the below linked supplier and the instructions you will get by clicking the ‘Download’ logo below, which will get you details on how to remove and replace the tube assembly.

Chances are you will end up replacing the tube assembly. It’s some $50.

Wonder about the magenta tint in the reports below? Yup. The Yellow Problem.

Replacing the feed tubes:

Download the Service Manual below and it has excellent and fault free instructions on replacement of feed tubes. I used the supplier mentioned in this article and the replacement came in an official HP box. I downloaded the manual to GoodReader on my iPad and followed along. Links are interactive so jumping to a page is a touch away.

New feed tubes ($50) and the manual on the iPad.

The whole replacement process took me 45 leisurely minutes. The trickiest part is replacing the right hand head cover, but do it just so and nothing will break. Not for klutzes. You will need Torx 8 and 10 screwdrivers and a flat bladed one to help release the catches on the right side cover. Use the wrong type of screwdriver and you will be buying a new printer. The following picture makes everything clear. The yellow feed tube is clogged:

Yellow clogged feed tube is circled in red.

The feed tubes from the ink cartridge to the head are extremely fine so I gave up on any idea of blasting them through with compressed air or cleaners. You can see just how fine in the following snap:

One feed tube – yellow – pulled away from the rubber guide strip.

After doing this you need to prime the new feed tube assembly using the button sequence in the Service Manual. Though the manual says not to prime tubes which have already been primed (meaning the ones in your machine) I did the priming process anyway (not being about to replace six heads) and all went well. Thereafter a quick head alignment and an Image Quality Diagnostic print confirmed that my yellow was back as evidenced by the proper colors of the two large green color squares in the test pattern – compared with the original I made when the printer was new five years ago.

Bizarre patterns on the head alignment report:

One reader of this piece contacted me with a picture of a strange pattern he was getting on the head alignment report. I annotated it and it looks like this:

Strange ink pattern from a reader’s DesignJet.

His Image Diagnostics print was OK – some head alignment issues but nothing major – but three of the colors were producing the above pattern on the head alignment print.

After some discussion it transpired that his DesignJet uses a power source subject to occasional brown-outs and power-on spikes. This suggests that three of his heads were fried by an inductive power-on spike and need to be replaced. Head cleaning – soft, medium and hard – made no difference. If you see this on yours, change one affected head first before throwing money at it. With a set of new printheads running some $200 you can solve the math to see whether it makes sense to install a surge protector in your printer’s power feed.

Follow up: It turned out no to be an electrical issue after all. Reprinted below, with permission, is Dave Shankie’s email explaining how he resolved the issue:

Thanks, Dave – this will help other Designjet users on the recovery trail. The HP site Dave refers to can be found here.

Resuscitating bad heads:

While I have had no joy trying to bring back bad heads to life with water or isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol, whether wiping on the spray ends or by dunking the whole thing, the same reader with the above ‘fried head’ problem (Dave S. from beautiful Vancouver Island) managed to bring a clogged head back to life using more caustic solvents. He first wiped the head with acetone, then with methyl alcohol, followed by a distilled water wipe.

Some warnings are in order. Acetone is nasty stuff. Do not soak a head in acetone – the plastic will melt, destroying the head. Use eye protection. Avoid open flames. Don’t breathe the fumes. Methyl alcohol is not much friendlier. Take the same precautions. Keep the family pet well away. The stuff in your Bloody Mary is ethyl alcohol, so don’t take a shot of the methyl if things don’t work out. Both methyl and ethyl can make you blind if ingested in quantity, but it’s usually a permanent result with methyl.

Printheads have a finite life – something like 3-4 of the large ink cartridges per head (which is a lot of prints) and will eventually need to be replaced. However, Commenter ‘design-jetset’ (see Comments below) managed to salvage his heads whose contacts were oxidized from extended cold storage, using a product named Deoxit, available from Amazon in both the US and UK. Be sure to get the one linked – ‘D5’. There are many variants.

Spare parts:

I’m a big believer in fixing it if possible. HP DesignJet printers are unlike modern digital cameras – it actually makes economic sense to fix them if you do the work yourself. Spare Parts Warehouse lists many replacement parts for the Designjet series (the link is to my base model DJ90, no network card or roller mechanism). I bought my replacement feed tubes from them (see above) and they came in the ‘official’ HP-branded box in short order. They seem to have everything from drive belts to motors, so it’s nice to know a long life awaits my DesignJet.

The feed tube assembly for the DJ90 is part # Q6656-60103; for the DJ130 it is # Q1292-60235 – use these numbers to search for replacement parts in your browser. Amazingly Amazon lists both as of March, 2015 – $166 for the (rarer) 90, $65 for the 130. I have not tried it but would bet that the 130 part can simply be cut down to fit the 90 – the end fittings at the printhead and ink cartridge ends are identical.

Reports:

The following reports were run before replacing the feed tubes to cure the clogged yellow one, hence the magenta cast, clearly visible on my profiled display. After feed tube replacement they print in solid, neutral black, as they should.

The usage report (see above for button sequence) for my DJ90 reports a modest 460 print jobs (HP cannot add properly – see below) so I expect many more years of life from the behemoth.

Use report. Holding the Power button press the ‘OK’ button once to generate this.

To get the more detailed Information report, holding ‘Power’ press ‘OK’ four times; here’s an extract of the two page report:

Information Report, Page 2.

If you are contemplating buying a used HP DJ 30/90/130:

A good, used DJ90/130 is one of the cheapest ways of getting large format, high quality printing.

Don’t pay more than $350 for a used DJ90 or more than $500 for a used DJ130 and only buy ones which can run the above report – which means that all the printheads are functioning as you cannot run the report otherwise. Don’t buy one where the seller claims he cannot run the report because ‘….one of the ink tanks is empty.’ Move on to the next one. Try and buy locally to save the beating UPS will give it. Inkjet printers are not robust devices.

The above report will tell you whether the machine is a pro’s beater (many DJs were used in print shops and you really want to avoid those) or an amateur user, like mine. Note in the red box, above, you can even see how many times the print heads have been replaced! A high count here is a sure indicator of heavy use or recurring problems – avoid. I’m not sure of the meaning of ‘Service Station Usage – 5%’ in the above but suspect it refers to the area where ink overflow from the cartridges is dumped. If I am right then you can see my DJ90 has had a very easy life indeed.

I suspect a used DJ30 (13″) is a waste of money as a new printer with that modest size capacity can be had inexpensively.

Printing over a network:

You do not need the network version of this printer if you use Mac OS X. All you need is an Airport Extreme or Airport Express wireless router, or a lot of time to mess about with aftermarket routers. The Apple products, when used with a Mac, are truly ‘plug-and-play’.

In its previous location my DJ90 was hard wired to my Mac with a USB cable. No more.

My workhorse HackPro, whence I print, resides in the home office and gets its network connection wirelessly from a remote Airport Extreme router in another room; the HP DesignJet 90 is connected to that Airport Extreme, using an USB cable and added to the list of available printers in System Preferences->Print & Fax.

No need to check the network sharing box with Bonjour.

Printing wirelessly from the HackPro is easy as can be. You don’t need high speed networks for this sort of thing as the printer is the slowest link in the chain and it is slow compared to any other peripheral you may have attached. Plus, OS X buffers the print job to disk if you use PS or LR so the application need not even be running once the print job is spooled out. I mention this as Apple’s Bonjour wireless technology which is being used here was a complete dog in the early versions of OS X but is now seamless and trouble free. Back then it was named ‘Rendezvous’ which is about as inaccurate as it gets.

You can even print to an HP DesignJet connected to an Apple router from your iPad or iPhone if you use an app like FingerPrint!

Well, the DJ90 is back in action …. until the next time.

Error codes:

The DesignJet has extensive error code diagnostics – here are the error codes if you need to repair yours; you can see some error codes (paper jams) in the report above:

Image Quality Diagnostic Page and Color Calibration:

Now here’s the real snag.

You can only print the Image Quality Diagnostic Page (see my earlier piece for an example) and recalibrate the printer for the latest HP paper using Leopard or earlier if you are on a Mac. That’s because Snow Leopard and later Mac OSs will not allow you to run the System Maintenance Utility. So either borrow a Windows computer (no files are transferred – the printer stores everything you do), use a Windows emulator like Virtual Box or Parallels or do as I do, use an older Mac running Leopard or Tiger. I use our old PPC G4 iMac running Leopard 10.5.8 and it works fine. You can still download the System Maintenance Utility from HP’s web site.

Finally, for the really serious:

Click to download the HP DesignJet Service Manual brochure.

This is the official service manual and if it’s not in here it probably does not exist. The software section is Windows-centric, wouldn’t you know it, but there are complete dismantling and replacement instructions toward the back which should ensure your DesignJet has the longest possible life! The file is some 8.9mB in size, so it will take a while to download. All versions of the DesignJet 10, 20, 30, 50, 70, 90, 100, 110, 120 and 130 are covered.

Finally, a big print.