My Oddest Print Job—Day 1

I received a call a few weeks ago from the writer and director of a movie that wrapped up shooting here in Montana several months ago. She'd been referred to me by another client (always a nice thing!). The job would be to print 40 stills from the film, one copy of each. A number of back-and-forth emails nailed down the details of paper choice, print size, delivery date, and, of course, pricing. The prints would be made on letter-size sheets of Epson Luster.

The director would be away for a couple of weeks, after which I was on a shooting trip for a week. Ordinarily I leave the printer in standby mode, but since I was gone I'd powered it down. While I was away the print files arrived. I've no idea what software was used to grab the stills from the film, but the files sent were .pct, the old Macintosh MacDraw format! I hadn't seen any of those in years. Each file was 8.3 megabytes. Photoshop CC refused to open these files. Several programs are available to convert .pct to other formats. The only application I already own that'll do the job is the Mac's Preview app; the only format it will convert picts to is PDF. Hardly my first choice, but I learned through experimentation that Photoshop opens these PDFs just fine, I can make the necessary adjustments as usual, and print.

I decided to print five to ten images per day, in part to spread the job out and exercise the 7900 over a period of several days, and in part to allow time for other work. I'll document each day's print run, mostly out of curiosity to see if similar runs in similar conditions produce similar results, or if the Epson will behave in its well-known random fashion, producing good nozzle checks one day, showing clogs another, along with any other weird behavior.

Speaking of conditions: we've had wetter than normal weather here, with nice rains in June and early July. That's kept the humidity somewhat higher than usual. However, there's been no rain for a week, and it's very warm (near 90°F most days), so things are drying out.

Day 1:

Last printing was twelve days ago. The 7900 had been powered down for the last six days. Upon powering up the nozzle check perfect. In the print studio relative humidity (RH) was 55%, temperature 70°F. Ten prints made, all perfect.

I'll post again when the second batch of prints is complete.

  --Jay