Print heads are a grid of jets that interleave and if one whole column of jets is not firing you get a set of evenly spaced stripes going side to side. Besides the clogging issues mentioned earlier, there are a few other possibilities. None of which bring good news.
It's possible that the print head is defective. Each column of jets share some electrical traces in the head and if the trace for a column breaks, that set of jets is broken.
It's also possible that one wire in the flexible wire going to the print head is bad. One wire can take out a whole column of jets.
Another possibility is a bad connection where the print head connects to the flex wire. That is usually a gold plated grid of contacts and not too likely to get a bad connection, but anything is possible. It can even happen from a small impurity in the gold mixture when manufactured. If it is a bad contact, it may be possible to remove the print head, clean the contacts, and put it back. I don't know what kind of printer you have and whether that is something that is simple to do.
If it's a bad head, you would need a new head. If it's a bad wire, that may be more difficult to replace than the head. If it's a bad contact, then that's the easiest and cheapest to fix of these three possibilities. Or it might be none of these. It's certainly a lot easier to clean clogged jets than to have to deal with any of the above. |