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.

[PCTech]

teckat, the scanning process that produced that PDF did no printing at all, there was a good print inserted into the ADF and the scan was sent to my mailbox... there was no drum involved in that instance.. Also if the device prints something out of its own accord like a failed to send report, it comes out perfect...

Screwtape : when you say check the main controller, do you have any tips or procedures for doing so?

[SCREWTAPE]

You mention that some prints came looking like the image was digitized and choppy.
Yes if its only happing when scanning, then the problem is in the reader section only.
But when prints come out intermitly looking digitized and choppy, the laser is still involve as teckat
mention. However when troubleshooting image faults we have to check everything that deals with
image processing. The main controller is part of the image processing for printer output. There other
sub boards on the main controller that deal with the rest of image processing.

The main controller is located at the rear, its basically in its own cage. I would recommend you have someone
who is trained on canon models such as the iR3100 to check out what your problem is.
That's the best tip I could give you at this point.

[PCTech]

Screwtape: I get what you are saying, but I really don't think it has anything to do with the laser or drum or printing in general, if you get the device to produce a page from the menu or from its own internal systems, like an error send report when it tries to fax... then the print is 100% perfect.. I have also had success printing using PS not PCL, if we use PCL then the problem shows up, it's a very "digital" distortion, perfectly formed thin lines scattered across the page, and the pattern follows a distorted version of the image but not in any sort of ghosting, reflection or other manner that could be created by poor laser alignment. I spent some time looking at examples of all the different types of distortion caused by different copier errors and nothing really matches... I'm going to lean towards it being the "main controller" which is the board that I've taken a look at. I thought I might be able to swap some of the cards over but they are totally different between the two ir3100c's we have. I've got an engineer coming down either this afternoon or Monday to take a look at them and see if we can get one "good" unit out of the two for the time being... I am already looking to find something along the lines of a 3200, 3220 or 2620 as a replacement, but we have these devices here now and we could really do with using them until something better passes through our hands.

Thanks guys for all your help, it's just unfortunate that the machine I thought would be good for spares has a totally different main board. I'll be sure to update this thread with the outcome of any work so should anyone else experience this type of distortion again they will know where to start board/component wise.

[teckat]

teckat, the scanning process that produced that PDF did no printing at all, there was a good print inserted into the ADF and the scan was sent to my mailbox... there was no drum involved in that instance.. Also if the device prints something out of its own accord like a failed to send report, it comes out perfect...

Screwtape : when you say check the main controller, do you have any tips or procedures for doing so?

All Images (Scans/Prints /Copies/Fax/Mailbox/that are printed from anywhere on this printer are applied to the ITB belt/image from the belt is then transferred to paper.

That PDF u posted, where did it or you print it from ???????

1.GLASS and ADF copies and Network prints are fine ??????
2.Only stored mailbox scans print out like that ??????
3.So when u printed out that PDF/ how do u think that image was produced/ by magic !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!/
that PDF analog scan to digital storage in your copier mailbox> why don't you explain the print and copy process to us

[PCTech]

1. No, the only things that have printed consistently fine are items produced internally to the device... for example the sheet that is produced when a Send job has failed (it was failing due to SMTP configuration at the mailserver end)

2. I've not mentioned stored mailboxes at all.. (*correction*) I mentioned mailboxes, as in my company e-mail box, which the device transmitted the scan to via SMTP...

3. Perhaps I wasn't clear... That PDF was scanned by the device... the document that was scanned was a perfectly printed Windows 2008 test page that was printed by the device... Sometimes the printing is good, for example I just did two seperate test pages with different driver versions to test the PS/PCL difference... both using PS this time and the first one came out with similar distortion and the second one came out perfectly... Please not the scan does not match the document that was put through the adf... the SCAN is distorted... This made me think it was the scanner at fault, but then some test pages sent from the network also display similar digital distortion I decided it must be something common to printing and scanning, but specific to neither which points me in the direction of the image processing systems.