I have an image I wanted to print for a show going up later this week. I've printed this before on my now-departed Canon printer, and I like the picture best on matte papers. In this case that's Epson's Ultra Premium Presentation Paper Matte, formerly known as the much friendlier to type Enhanced Matte. To begin, I made a change to the 7900's default settings: I turned off ANC (auto-nozzle check). I checked ink levels on the printer's display, and then pressed the black ink change button.
The printer made its "thinking about this" sounds for a couple of minutes and showed a progress bar on the LCD. When finished it then displayed "Matte Black" where it had previously shown "Photo Black". I again checked ink levels and found no change to any color, nor to the remaining capacity of the maintenance cartridge. I'd read this process consumes a small amount ink when switching between blacks. Must be a pretty small amount (this is defined in the manual).
I then ran a nozzle check print. This is where something unexpected happened. I inserted a letter size sheet of plain bond paper as usual, and used the printer's control panel to initiate the nozzle check print. The machine started as usual, but instead of printing, the print head made numerous passes across the full width of the carriage, something it had not done before. It did not feed the sheet of paper as it was doing this. Thinking something was wrong I canceled the process, and then tried again. Same result, so I canceled again. I cycled power to the printer and then tried again, with the same result. This time I let the printer run, just to see what would happen. The print head ran back and forth for a couple of minutes (I did not time it), and then the nozzle check printed as it usually does. There were no clogged nozzles (the printer does run a cleaning cycle when the blacks are switched). It's not clear whether this cleaning affects all channels or just the blacks (MK/PK is paired with with LK). I checked ink levels and found C, MK, VM, and LK had all dropped by 1%, which may answer the question regarding other channels being cleaned as well. There was apparently no change to the maintenance cartridge.
I conclude from this that the switch from one black ink to the other is not completed when the progress bar gets to 100% and the process appears to be finished. It completes when the next print job begins. Whether the process appears the same when switching back to PK remains to be seen.
With that out of the way I ran a profile test print using the Epson-supplied profile for the Enhanced Matte paper. Despite the new name, I don't consider this a premium paper, but I rather like it. It's smooth, bright-white, inexpensive, and the profile test image looks very nice. Being a matte paper with far lower Dmax than Ilford's Galerie Gold Fiber Silk or Epson's Exhibition Fiber, the blacks and dark shades don't hold up in side-by-side comparisons, but on its own it looks pretty good. The big gotcha with this paper is its poor archival properties. For the print I started out to make this isn't an issue.
I ran in to trouble right away when I set up to print my picture. This is a vertically oriented image. The top and bottom margins on a letter size sheet must be quite small to accommodate the mat and frame I'd planned to use. I knew when I was setting up I'd likely find the image clipped, and that turned out to be the case. I will not be able to print this image on letter size sheets on the Epson. The Canon iPF 5000 handled the small margins on the sheet just fine. Fortunately, I don't often want to make a print with such small borders, but when I do I'll have to use larger sheets and cut them down after printing. I should make it clear the printer's manual states sheets should be fed with the narrow edge down, but this experiment seemed worth trying.
I wasted about half an hour trying to make the print in landscape mode with the paper fed into the printer with the wide edge down. This should have worked because my side borders on this image are considerably wider than the top and bottom. Feeding the paper "sideways" would give the printer plenty of room to grip the sheet on the trailing edge. But no combination of settings in the driver, nor rotating the image 90° in Photoshop, would alter the orientation of the printed image. I even created a custom paper size and once again tried all of the orientation options, with the same result. I eventually gave up.
So, after all that, I didn't get the print I set out to make.
Since I'd switched to MK, I ran a profile test print on Museo Portfolio Rag, using the profile downloaded from Museo's site. I'm still trying to interpret the results, which are a little strange. I'll set the print aside until tomorrow and then look at it again. This is a heavy, 100% cotton rag paper with a smooth texture and, lacking optical brighteners, a warm tone. I like it, but I've had problems in the past determining which side is to be printed. Even under magnification I can't tell the two sides apart, and in my experience with a single package of cut sheets, Museo has not been consistent in getting the printed side up (or down). There's no indication on the box which side is "up". My box was thoroughly mixed, and I wasted a number of sheets by printing on the wrong side. It's very obviously wrong, but only after printing has begun. I won't be buying any more of this paper, but I do have a small quantity I'd use if I could figure out how. Back when I bought this box, my emailed inquiries to the maker went unanswered.
I have one more matte paper I want to test. Moab's Entrada Natural 300 gsm was wonderful, if one could get past the texture, on the iPF 5000. I have a couple of pictures that look great on this paper. I have a 17" roll, so when I get some time I'll cut a piece from it, download the profile from Moab's site, and run the test print.
--Jay
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