IR3100cn Unusual Image Distortion

[PCTech]

First of all I must apologise if this has been covered before, I've done a great deal of googling while trying to understand this problem and eventually came across the wonderful wealth of knowledge on this site, however nothing I've read on here seems to describe the issue I'm having with this device. I have found a service manual online which I've purchased and should arrive in the next few days, but I thought I'd post this query here in the vain hope that it is either something simple or perhaps even something of interest to any of you!

So first a little back story, part of our business is an auction house that moves a lot of ex-office equipment, so printers, scanners, PC's, etc... We run a couple of IR3100C's in our office which are covered by a support contract and we're happy(ish) with their performance.

Recently a couple more of these devices came into our hands with the iSend functionality which would be massively useful to us (myself personally as it would remove the need for my users to scan their documents using TWAIN like network software and then convert them to PDF locally which although a simple enough process, seems to cause a lot of confusion to some people). Anyway, onto the issue.

I fired up the first IR and couldn't get it to feed a single sheet out of its drawer, I'm sure this can be rectified but I moved onto the second. I loaded one of the trays and put a test sheet in the feeder, when the print came out it had a large number of short vertical lines of variable thickness seemingly randomly placed. I figured it could be a scanning issue so I went into the menus and printed out a couple of reports successfully with no distortion. So then I hooked the thing up to a quick test network and printed a couple of Printer Test Pages out, I got good prints the first few times, but every now and then I would see similar distortion to the printed image.

Next step and onto the clincher... I took the plunge and spent 5 minutes getting the device talking to our mail system here and took a scan to my mailbox, the resulting PDF is attached (apologies, it's a whole MB, I will have to adjust the quality settings to shrink that down if I ever get to it!) the distortion on the copies is very similar to the distortion seen in the image, although the best approximation of it can be seen in the top band where the "Windows 2008" line of text should be... If anyone would like to see a copy of one of the printouts I will gladly scan that on one of our other copiers and upload it here..

Now I'm not going to go digging into this device as I really don't want to get blinded or pull something out that I really shouldn't be handling, I fully intend to let the guys that run our support contract come down and fix this if it's possible, I just don't want to have the wool pulled over my eyes by them regarding what is actually wrong with it. My initial thoughts were either bad memory as I've seen similar issues on computer displays when video card memory goes bad, hard disk failure or a loose connection somewhere... Anyway, here's hoping one of you experienced canon techs has seen this before and you can tell me it's something simple!

Apologies for the long story, if you need any more information about the device just let me know and I'll get right on it!

Mike

[PCTech]

As a further development to this issue the printing is getting worse... Same distortion as in the pdf, but on the print out... Has anybody got even the remotest clue? I'm going to grab a UPS in case our power is a little shakey in this new building....

Does anybody know of any diagnostic menus I can access to run tests?

[D_L_P]

I've seen similar distortion on a Canon IR600. The fix was replacing the memory PCB which is piggybacked on th IP controller. Of course this probably doesn't help you at all since it is an IRC3100. But just to give you a rough idea what you are looking at, it looks like some PCB will need replaced.
Have them start cheap and just replace the memory Dimms 1st then go to the more expensive. Replacing the 2 SD-RAMS is fairly easy and you could save some money by buying and replacing them yourself. Just make sure you buy the right 512 and 256 SD-Ram.

WA7-3859-000 Dimm SMS-5128QN1P-H SD-RAM
WA7-2847-000 Dimm C256M6815SRN-MA81 SD-RAM

Possibly the SRam PCB ( FG3-3225-000) is bad, or even the Main controller PCB.
GL

[PCTech]

My PC experience told me it was a memory issue, I took the liberty of removing and re-seating the RAM and I believe I did the same with the memory PCB... it seemed to have a large button type battery on the board which I found odd... As a last attempt I am going to remove and re-seat the board the scanner plugs in to... It has been transported in a van so it seems possible that something has wiggled itself free during transport.

Thank you for getting back and confirming my suspicions!

[anothertech]

If re-seating the memory and connections does not help, try taking parts out of the machine that does not feed to troubleshoot with.

[PCTech]

I thought I was on to a winner, we had another IR3100c with a pretty twisted chassis that was making clunking noises and throwing errors and thought I might be able to salvage some parts but they have completely different boards, they even take different RAM... so many screws just to find this out was a total soul destroyer!

There are a few boards in there, not entirely sure what they are but I'm going to pull them all and look up their part numbers to find out what we need and what we don't... I ran a HD test the day before yesterday (holding 1 and 9 during power up I think) and that seemed to finish off by filling the screen with white blocks slowly and then saying something about a download on a black screen... I did a bit of searching for this bit of text at the time and decided it was a red herring and that it would have thrown an error screen had something actually been wrong... I got into Service mode and ran a clean on everything just in case (it couldn't be dirt, the distortion is wholly digital here, this I am certain of, but i had to do it while I had the option!) Are there any other connections I could check on the machine barring the board that is exposed behind the hard disk when you take the back panel and cover off?

I have access to a high grade oscilloscope and volt meters if we think any of the DC feeds could be playing up, although I haven't managed to stick a UPS in the loop and see if that improves anything but I doubt it will... What bugs me is the copier arrived with a full set of test sheets, perfectly printed... something MUST have happened in transit... If I can't get anywhere tomorrow with pulling the boards I'm going to get someone down to give me a quote for the work they think needs doing... While we're on the subject, will the printer still function without the board that the scanner unit plugs in to? Could I lterally remove every board except for the network card and then see if it prints? or will the thing just fail to boot?

Thank you all for taking the time here!

[teckat]

that print pdf looks like a Laser Issue ?????

[PCTech]

teckat: how would a laser issue mess up a scan? Note that the attached PDF was produced by running two perfectly formed test pages that the device itself had produced earlier through the ADF... Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there is a laser involved in the scanning process?

[teckat]

teckat: how would a laser issue mess up a scan? Note that the attached PDF was produced by running two perfectly formed test pages that the device itself had produced earlier through the ADF... Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there is a laser involved in the scanning process?

the Laser is being used for = SCANS/PRINTS/ & COPIES- what do u think writes to the Drum Surface ????

[SCREWTAPE]

Check your main controller.