Dave Hildebrand.com

Our Canon MP390 has been printing black text poorly for a weeks. Running the cleaning application did nothing to help the poor prints. Luckily the MP390 has a removable print head. Unlike most other printer manufacturers, Canon does not build print heads into the new ink cartridges. Instead of paying for a new print head I popped it out and took it to the sink. A few minutes running under warm/hot water flushed it out. I then used a paper towel to get most of the water off of it. Make sure to not rub the print head, dab it onto a paper towel only. A can of compressed air does a good job of getting the last few droplets off the print head. After reinserting the ink cartridges, a few print head cleanings, an alignment and the printer was back printing like when it came out of the box.