If your printhead is not faulty entirely, then you can still squeeze some mileage from that clogged or deteriorating printhead. We demonstrated two methods that you can save money to print with printheads in less desirable conditions. We compared the results of using these methods and provided resources to diagnose, repair your cartridge or printhead, and ways to save money.

When you have a terrible nozzle checking pattern, you should troubleshoot it. Mimaki has an excellent article here. I also have a playlist about how to unclog Epson, if you want to see that. Also, I'm going to post in the description. Today, I'm talking about that there's no way you can save your printhead, and your printhead print something looks like this. You've already done the cleaning, you already have done everything possible, and now the printhead is ready for the trash can.

Can you still squeeze some life out of that printhead? I'm going to talk about two solutions here. The first one only applies to specific models of Canon, but the second one is universal. Let's say you have Windows 10. From the printer device, then you go to manage. Then go to print preferences, and then go to maintenance, and then go to cartridge settings. If Canon allows you only to use the color or black cartridge, you're in luck. Let's say my black cartridge is damaged, but still, my color cartridge is okay. Now I can let the computer to mix up three colors to make it black.

However, no matter what you do, the other cartridge cannot be faulty. If you see that a printer says a cartridge cannot be detected or the cartridge is damaged, you cannot use that cartridge. You have to have a dummy cartridge or something. That electronic sound on the other slot, although you're not using it, you have to have it in there. The leftmost one is the regular one. I use both cartridges. In the middle lines, I turn off the black cartridge and only use the color cartridge. You can see the black is not as dark as it could be. For the third one on the right, I only use the black cartridge. I do not use the color cartridge. However, my cartridge runs out at the end.

The second solution is when you have other nozzles working. For example, here we have cyan, yellow, magenta, and photo black. We have four nozzles working. It just one black nozzle not working. How about that we use the working nozzles? In this example, wait-- no, the black is not working. How about that we only use the yellow nozzles? We'll fill the yellow with black and only print from yellow. They're going to ask me where I can get this cool stuff like this? I'm going to put a link in the description if you want to get one of those. It makes refill easy.

There's a website that you can change a PDF into one color. I'm going to put this website in my description of this video. There are lots of software like Word, Excel. You can export your document into a PDF. Then after that, you will upload it to this page. Then you'll pick up which color you want to download. I think you can just directly put in yellow, cyan, magenta, light magenta. I think you can also input a hex code. I put a yellow hex code here, so you can see it converted to yellow. After that, you can click download, download a PDF all in yellow.

Okay, let's print this because we know we fill the yellow with a black, so this accurate printout is black.

References:

Mimaki nozzle check pattern troubleshooting: https://mimaki.com/support/faq/trouble/entry-5839...
Printhead cleaning playlist: https://mimaki.com/support/faq/trouble/entry-5839...
Sponge Canon refill-kit for PG-245/CL-246: https://mimaki.com/support/faq/trouble/entry-5839...
Sponge Canon refill-kit for PG-240/CL-241 PG-260/CL-261: https://mimaki.com/support/faq/trouble/entry-5839... Convert PDF to one color: https://mimaki.com/support/faq/trouble/entry-5839...
Color hex code: Cyan: #00FFFF Magenta: #FF00FF Yellow: #FFFF00 LC (Light Cyan): #E0FFFF LM (Light Magenta): #FF80FF