Drawing pure, one color, ink from a chamber in a cartridge is an excellent way to diagnose problems with the print head and/or the ink in the chamber being tested. One of the problems is knowing which color to specify to get pure Light (photo) Cyan or Light (photo) Magenta. Here is a diagram, derived from the Epson Nozzle Check image (eputbm03.wbf). If you have a PC and an Epson photo printer installed, you can find this file in the Windows/System folder.

These colors may or may not match the exact ink colors in the cartridge, the important thing is that the printer is drawing ink from only one chamber at a time with out mixing inks from two or more chambers.

A perfect nozzle check is a prerequisite to a good print. If the nozzle check has gaps or broken segments, the printer will skip and band when an image is printed. Be sure you have a good nozzle check before proceeding with your images.

A perfect nozzle check does not mean your printer will print perfectly.  Many times, the nozzles will be just temporarily ok.  When you start making a print, they break up and produce banded output.  To validate your nozzle pattern or ink delivery system, print our purge6 or purge4 image at 360 dpi, with the plain paper setting.

Download purge.zip (59kb) to get these test patterns and others.   To expand the file you will need WinZip for PC's or Stuffit for Mac's

For 4 color printers, there is no light cyan or light magenta. The Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black are the same as shown above.