HP L28500 , loosing printhead during print

Hello,

Want to rise a topic concerning loss of prithead during printing.

We having L28500.

During the whole time we have had this printer in our production we had suffered problems with loosing printhead only light cyan and light magenta during printing, with the effect that the print is not ok

This is very problematic when one prints tiles for murals or trucksides and the tiles do not colormatch, due to loss of color channels. This pehnomen use to happen when printhead has fires around 6-700 ml ink. The inkchannel just goes blanc meaning all nozzels go away and none is firing.

I have asked local HP service technican and was told that they thought it had to do whit the electrical connection and they thought the “grease” that’s on the connectors on the print head played a role in the case. We did some tests and changed postions of the two cyan heads and did notice that the head that normally worked fine started to mess directly when its position was changed…

It happens in every passes or in what ever ips.

I ask you HP professionals what is you answer, is there anything I can do in order to prevent this ?

It is not a safe way of running as having it as we have today when we never know when the printhead is lost. The machine do not either tell when it happens. And we always uses double printgutters in order to have visual check also and we have also activated extra PH cleaning. We had a silly belif that it was important to have the printhead activate

Hope you have a solution !

Hi krimat,

I'm sorry, but it seem one of those problems which that might be solved by the support team. As I read you said that you already escalated the problem to them, which is great.

As long as I know they are already working on it. Plase let us know the answer that they provide you.

Hi Marc,

thanks for your reply.

Well I must clarify. I am not 100% sure that they reported it in to HP staff. This was just somtehing mentioned during a service visit caused by other problem.

Maybe you can mention or ask some of your fellow collegues in Barcelona ?

Best regards

Hi Krimat,

I've asked to the support team and it looks that they have a similar case that looks really similar to yours. Can you send me by PM your reseller's name in order to confirm it.

Hi Krimat,

I came across your post as I too have been struggling for a looong time with the light colours on the heads deteriorating way before the normal colours. I've heard everything from it's a head issue, to faulty ink to inappropriate usage (!).

I run a L28500 and since Oct 2014 I started running into massive issues with the light cyan sides of the heads conking out. Then the light magenta's became an equally big issue.

HP's exchange on the heads were fine, apart from the obvious issue of the tonnes of wasted media, but if that head was just on ml over it's intended warranty life you were buggered! I've had K/Y heads with over 11litres of ink through them! So the 1l limit seems silly. I've also found that running the heads cooler gets a lot of extra print miles out of them. I do this by removing the opperating side cover and having an fan blowing on the carraige. Low tech, but it works! Ever had those messages, especially on older heads, saying you need to reseat the heads? Next time, just remove the cover and cool the heads down. Problem gone!

We eventually had to create profiles that omitted light colours, but this is a crap solution to a bigger problem.

So, to my question - did you ever get a solid answer and resolve to the problem?

Hello there,

well sorry for not attending at this forum that often...saw your post just now.

Well the only response I got som far from my re-sellers "bull**bleep**-artist" was that problem was that I havent the latest firmware and by not having this they couldnt get any refund from HP. I thought this was crap since I use to get orginal HP heads from 2 different authorizied HP resellers. My re-seller had so many unlogical answers to this mattes so I considered them to the very unlikely. the firmware was updated to the lastets ver 12 and the problem still exist.

The biggest problem is right know that you never can let the printer work overnight. You must alwas attend it. i use gutter control strips. My biggest hope was to expand mural print via the web but I just cant do it since I not often can print a mural where the tiles match in color. It is very irritating. As you write it is plenty of waste that has been produced during theese years...I can honest confess that my sincere hope when ordering this printer back in 2012 was that this problems never would exist....... I have changed roughly 11 C/ LC heads and 12 M/LM heads during theese years... I do not think that this is normal...

Our problem now is that it does not seem that there will come any replacement printer for the L28500/ L280 and the support seems to be limited for this model nowadays...

Hello @krimat

I just want to make clear that HP continues to support this unit, until October 2020.

Assuming, that the printer has no problems and operates ok. I can suggest the following check points:

• Set your sleep mode to 120 minutes (Setup> Front panel options> Sleep mode wait time)
• Try to recover the PHs by cleaning the affected PrintHeads (Ink> Image-quality maintenance> Extra PH cleaning). If you are not able to recover the PrintHeats with cleaning, I recommend replacing the PrintHeads, two of the same color at the same time. Remember that PrintHeads have a warranty of 1000ml.
• Use the spit bars (you already do). You might try to make them wider.

Alternately, you can also try to:

• Enable Inter-Swath Delay (ISD) over RIP
• Rotate tiles alternately
• Reduce the Minimum Drying Power by RIP

I hope this suggestions work