There's nothing worse than hitting print on your latest artwork, ducking off to grab a coffee while it's printing, only to return to a completed print that is full of banding.
Most common cause of this is blocked nozzles. It creates an inconsistent lay down of ink across your image that often shows as dark bands in your image. If you notice this, stop your print and then perform a nozzle check. The image below shows a clean nozzle check pattern and also an example of quite a lot of missing nozzles.
You will unlikely be faced with as many missing nozzles as above, unless you have left your printer unused for a long time, or you have a printer issue.
On the printer, follow the screen prompts to perform a clean. Only ever do a light or medium clean. A powerful clean should only be done on recommendation from a service agent, as it pulls a lot of ink through, and can stressful on your print heads. If after two or three light/medium cleans you aren't getting better results then we suggest printing large blocks of solid colours of each CMYK at 100%. By doing this it will pull the ink through more than your standard clean, but not as harshly as the powerful clean.
Look at the nozzle checks before and after a few cleans. Take note, if the gaps are in the same spot or if they have moved. If they are moving then it is something physically on the head like a hair, dust or dried ink. These will likely dislodge or be removed from another clean. If the gaps are in the same spot and subsequent cleans don't solve it, you may need a tech to do deeper cleans or possibly replace a print head in the worst case scenario.
If you only see one or two single gaps this shouldn't effect print quality, so you can opt to start printing and it will likely clear as you print.
Best practice, and our recommendation, is to do daily nozzle checks and before any large print runs. It uses almost no ink to do the check and can save you lots of time and money on misprints.
If the above doesn't solve the issue, the other cause of banding can be a feed issue. Make sure that you are choosing the correct media type as per your what you are printing on. The reason for this is so that printer knows what rate to pull the media through as it prints via your settings that you put into the printer before you even press print. If the settings are incorrect the media can pull more or less through while printing, creating either a dark or light band across your image.
To rectify a feeding issue, firstly check that you are loading the paper with the correct settings to match the paper. If it is still an issue under the maintenance menu there is a feed adjustment. Follow the screen prompts to print a test pattern and realignment.