Head cleaning
BF
that is clogged instead of having to do a cleaning cycle on all of the
heads, which uses ink for heads that aren't clogged?
Tony
Essentially because of cost.
Head cleaning with most, maybe all, ink printers requires some suction to be
applied to the nozzles while ink is being expressed through them. To
selectively clean nozzles would require a more complex and therefore more
expensive cleaning station.
Tony
Nicolaas Hawkins
Because it uses (read:wastes) more ink ... so the user has to buy more ink
more often ... and they make their money selling ink, not printers.
--
- Nicolaas
Arthur Entlich
the mechanics involved, they want to have you use up as much ink as
possible, because they make most of their money on the ink sales.
Older Epson printers used to have separate black and color inks and
cleaning systems. With the precision the heads have in terms of
positioning, they could easily have a small cleaning station which only
cleaned one area of the head (one set of nozzles). They could even have
a wet cleaning system which sued a cleaning fluid to wash the head area
down. To do this probably wouldn't add greatly to the costs, but it
would lower ink consumption considerably, and that's not what the inkjet
manufacturers are wishing to do.
Art
If you are interested in issues surrounding e-waste,
I invite you to enter the discussion at my blog:
http://e-trashtalk.spaces.live.com/
Al
I know my method is not the same as the cleaning cycle, but if I have
one color that is not performing, I print blocks of that solid color
from MS Word and that usually solves the problem without wasting all
the other colors. In fact, the six color test page seems to work real
well as a head cleaner. I use that after refilling my Canon and HP 9XX
series printers. I think the secret is to buy cheap refill ink and
become knowledgeable about filling your carts. Then a little extra
wasted on cleaning cycles doesn't hurt so much.
Gel
My Brother MF620 certainly has feature to clean just 1 of the 4
nozzles.