Inkjet printer problems - your help needed

Factual Questions
1

I’m currently on holiday, and one of the other people here is having trouble with her portable printer.

It’s a Canon Pixma i90, probably a couple of years old. It’s recently had new cartridges put in - although the cartridges had been lying around for a while, they were still sealed.

When the printer’s owner tried to print a colour document, she only got the yellow coming up - nothing from red or blue.

When she tried printing a black and white document, or a colour document in black and white, the print is coming out with white stripes across it; a lot of the text is not printing.

The woman needs her printer to do stuff for other people here. I’ve tried googling, but couldn’t find anything relevant. Do any of the Doper community know what’s wrong? And how to fix it? The owner would be eternally grateful, and possibly even send pie.

TIA.

2

Inkjets were created for only two reasons: to make lousy prints, and to make you pay a lot of money for cartridges. But we have to live with them.

3

You need to run the cleaning routine that will be in the printer utilities. The place to go for printer problems is the manufacturers web site and use their site search engine. A less likely problem is that the contacts are corroded, this almost never happens.

4

Canon support page.

You have to do the search, because the page will not show if I direct link.

  1. printers
  2. PIXMA ip series
  3. PIXMA ip90

On the Support & Service page go to Please enter your question:.
Enter white lines.

Now choose an appropriate category.
This now falls into in your lap to deal with.

5

A trick which works sometimes for me is to run the cartriges under hot water for a bit. This can help old cartriges which might be a bit stopped up. I would try Harmonius’ suggestions first.

6

This is sometimes a problem with older inkjets.