Inkjet printers when not used for some days show abnormal printing behavior. Sometimes a particular colour will be missing from the print or faded print when printing black and white document. These printing problems arise due to clogging of printer head due to dried ink. Sometimes a dust particle can also cause similar problem. Papers we use have dust on them and dust in the air can also get inside the printer and cause all the problems. What we need to do is clean printer head regularly for optimum printing. There is an option in printer maintenance settings which allow auto cleaning of printer head. What this feature does is force some amount of ink from each colour to squirt on the waste ink pads and thus cleaning the head. This leads to lots of wastage of ink and also spoils waste ink pad. Stage comes when printer stops working and require change of these pads. There is a counter inside the printer software which keeps track on how many times the auto clean function was used and once this counter reach a certain value, it stops the printer from printing anything and ask you to get it serviced.
To avoid these unnecessary services what you need to do is clean the head in a different way which will not only save ink from getting wasted but also not saturate the waste ink pads. All you need to do is print this page on any ordinary A4 size paper using best photo mode. In this page you will see that I have put four squares of CMYK colour. You will be surprised to see that after printing this page your printer head will be clean for printing any other documents or photographs now and negligible amount of ink was wasted.