Ink jet printing method and printer

Abstract

A method compensates a failing nozzle of a print head of an inkjet printer. The inkjet printer includes at least one print head, the at least one print head including a plurality of nozzles. A receiving material is moved relatively to the at least one print head. The method includes ejecting droplets of marking material from the plurality of nozzles onto the receiving material forming dots of an image, scanning the printed dots, analyzing the scanned dots for detecting whether a nozzle is failing, determining a group of nozzles, which group of nozzles most likely contains the nozzle that is failing, selecting one nozzle of the group of nozzles, in an image part ejecting compensating droplets of marking material in accordance with a compensation scheme selected as if the one nozzle is failing, scanning the image part, repeating the steps of ejecting and scanning for each other nozzle in the group of nozzles, analyzing each image part, selecting from the image parts a deviating image part, the deviating image part having a highest or lowest print quality of all image parts, selecting a compensation scheme based on the deviating image part, and proceeding with printing, including ejecting compensating droplets in accordance with the selected compensation scheme. An inkjet printer is configured to execute the method.