Nozzle check page
One band per ink — black, cyan, magenta, yellow — each a stepped staircase over forty numbered hairlines. A missing line is a blocked nozzle, and the number gives it a name.
Print at 100 per cent with margins set to none — the sheet carries its own 10 mm margin, and a second one from the browser is what makes a printer shrink the page.
Which band is which cartridge
The bands run in the order black, cyan, magenta, yellow from the top, and each is labelled beside it. A gap in the top band is the black cartridge; a gap in the second is cyan, and so on down. On a printer with light cyan and light magenta tanks those inks are not addressed here at all — this sheet asks for four inks by name, and the driver decides whether to reach for the light tanks to build the half-tone patch at the foot of each band.
Print it, then keep it. The value of a nozzle check is almost entirely in the comparison: the same sheet printed before and after a head clean tells you whether the clean worked, and a single sheet on its own rarely does.
Reading the staircase and the comb
The staircase is a run of short strokes stepping down across the band, each laid by a different group of nozzles. A blockage shows as one step printing faintly or not at all while its neighbours are solid — a repeatable position rather than general fading. The comb underneath is forty fine lines, numbered every fifth, so a missing line can be written down as "line 23" and looked for again later.
Fading that affects the whole band evenly is usually a tank running low. A single missing line with clean lines either side of it is a blocked nozzle. Lines that are present but wavy point at a head that needs aligning rather than cleaning.
Before you clean the head
Head cleaning spends ink, sometimes a surprising amount of it, and repeated cleans in a row waste more than they recover. Run one cycle, print this sheet again, and compare it with the one you kept. If nothing changed after two cleans, leaving the printer switched on and idle overnight resolves more blockages than a third cycle does.
Common questions
What is a nozzle check page?
A pattern of very fine lines, one group per ink, printed so that any nozzle failing to fire leaves a visible gap. It is the standard first test for a printer producing streaky or faded output.
How do I know which nozzle is blocked?
Find the missing line and read the nearest number. The lines are numbered every fifth across each band, so a gap can be identified precisely and checked again after cleaning.
Can I print a nozzle check without the printer software?
Yes — that is what this page is. The driver version reports the same thing, but this one can be printed from any device that can reach a browser, including a phone.
Every band is faint, not just one. What now?
Check the print quality setting first: draft mode thins every ink at once. If it is already on normal, uniformly faint output across all four inks usually means paper feed or head height rather than a blockage.