Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

http://www.ddisoftware.com/qimage-u

v2019.100      Oct 20, 2018

Priority: Med

2019.100 includes:

• Spool and cool: New spool and cool feature can prevent overheating of the printhead and eliminate ink drops that can occur when printing larger jobs (more than a few pages).
  
  • Choose Edit, Preferences, Printing Options and select the spool and cool feature.
  • Set maximum number of pages to print (in a row) before printing is paused to cool and park/wipe the head.
  • Set amount of time to pause before printing resumes.
  • Your printer will take a "break" at the specified interval (# pages) to cool down, then resume printing.  Example: pause for 2 minutes every 5 pages.
  • Settings are saved in printer setups and jobs so you can specify different parameters for different (size) papers.
• Fix: For those who have the plugins, the plugin installer has been fixed and will now find all versions of Photoshop/Elements rather than just the oldest copy.

Mike

Hello Mike,

I have never encountered an overheated print head with my HP Z3200 etc printers. Not on long print runs either. is this a remedy for some types of printers/brands? If a print head fails on my Z models it usually is after a prolonged time of no use.

Met vriendelijke groet, Ernst

http://www.pigment-print.com/spectralplots/spectrumviz_1.htm
March 2017 update, 750+ inkjet media white spectral plots

On any thermal printhead that actually boils the ink to deliver it, heat is a concern.  Canon printers are thermal and I believe HP as well.  On any device that produces heat, the less heat you produce, the longer it will last in general.  Not sure how you'd know if your printhead was overheating... or just running hot enough to reduce its lifespan.  It'll just die an early death and you either get a new printer or a new printhead.  Even when you assume your head died due to non-use, heat may very well have been a factor: letting the head run continuously for long periods without the printer-idle maintenance/cooldown could be allowing ink to accumulate on the hot head, dry, and that could be part of what clogs it later during that down time.

Even with non-thermal printers (primarily Epsons), ink buildup from printing page after page without pause is also an issue.  My Canon Pro-100 does it and my prior Epson R1900 did it: print too many pages at once without allowing the head to park/wipe and residual ink can build up on the surface of the head and deposit unwanted ink in the form of stripes or ink drops, ruining prints.  The nozzles aren't perfect and they can't lay down a drop with zero residue or splashback and ink slowly builds up on the head during printing.  The extent to which that problem is present depends on settings like borderless, paper size, paper type, etc.

Regards,
Mike

Could be my computer?.......I"m getting a lot of "Please Wait" dialog in yellow and Qimage takes forever to respond.....I've already lowered the quality of the thumbnails to minimise processing.

The "Please Wait" yellow reminders are generated when Qimage is building thumbs and cache, and you ask it to do a different chore.
Just let it finish the "build" and no more waiting time.
Look above the thumbs and watch the numbers changing.
Fred

Qimage is much faster if only use it towards the end of the process - that means start it up for printing. If i try to use like Adobe Bridge it will slow down too much....processing in the background to try to keep up with the updates to the files.