Head Strikes and Blotch Issues on Inkjet Prints

Head strikes are a relatively common problem with inkjet printers and fine art media - the visible result can be smudging or smearing of ink on the page, marks around the edges of your prints, or ink droplet marks anywhere on your print.

There are several things you can do to reduce or eliminate these issues:

• Keep your printer exceptionally clean - inside and out. Clean everything you can get your hands on, very gently, using a slightly damp cloth/cotton bud. You can also use isopropyl alcohol (available from chemists), but note that this may eventually dry out rubber parts like print rollers. Oritech has a Rubber Roller Restorer that you an use on the rollers, for approximately $15, that will last you a life time. If you are nervous about cleaning your printer yourself you can have a printer repair shop do this for you. Ask them to replace the 'nappy' or ink pad at the same time. We recommend Electron Flow for this.
• If you have a replaceable maintenance cartridge in your printer, change this regularly - at least as often as the printer tells you to.
• Only use paper that is within the thickness guidelines for your printer model. See the specifications page for your printer on the manufacturer's site, and/or the manual that came with your printer.
• When loading the paper, first lay it flat on a table to check and see if it is curled? Often fine art papers have a slight curl to them. Flex the paper gently but firmly back against itself until you can get it to sit quite flatly on a table. We have a more detailed article on dealing with paper curl [here].
• The most effective thing you can do is to use the platen gap controls in your printer driver, if they are available to you, to set the platen gap to a wider setting - go all the way to the widest setting if necessary. The platen gap is the distance between the printer head and the page and is the single thing that can virtually eliminate most head strikes.

How to set the platen gap

One way to set the platen gap is through your printer driver. You can save the setting as a preset for the media you are using so you don't have to remember to do this each time. Check your printer's manual on how to do this - sometimes it is just labelled as 'Use Thick Media' but often you have to go into 'Paper Configuration' and set the Platen Gap control to 'Wider' or 'Widest'.

Note that with the latest Epson machines, this is now done using the separate 'Media Installer' tool - you must create a custom media entry with the appropriate Platen Gap/Paper Thickness setting as part of that (see the 'solving head strikes section of this article).

Below you can see an example from an Epson 3800 - this control is present in almost all Epson drivers in one form or another.

You can also generally set the platen gap usually using the printer's control panel.  But please note - this will almost always be overruled by the printer driver so you MUST attend to this issue at the software end of things (when you send prints to an Epson printer, the print is sent with a 'package of settings' from the driver - so if the driver is set to the standard platen gap, the setting in the printer's control panel makes no difference at all for that print!).