"Resetting—please wait..."

On 16 November I posted a note about a 7900 resetting issue friend Dean had experienced with his printer. He explained a bit in a posting to the Luminous Landscape forums. That thread's not been active lately, but in private emails Dean's mentioned the problem has recurred several times. I'd never seen the issue here. Dean uses a Win7 system and connects to his 7900 via USB. I use a Mac, and my printer is on the wired network.

Thinking the problem may be a failing USB port on his computer's motherboard, Dean switch to a different port. I haven't heard whether he's experienced the problem since.

[Update 19 December: The problem hasn't recurred since Dean switched to a different USB port.]

Yesterday, it happened to me, which probably eliminates the USB port as the likely cause.

I had some unusual circumstances leading up to the problem. My 7900 has been powered-up for most of a year. When not in use it goes into standby mode. Last week, however, the local power utility scheduled an outage that was to last up to two hours. I powered down the printer and switched off its UPS. As I didn't expect to be printing soon, I left the machine off after the power to the mains was restored.

Yesterday I received, via email, a print job. The client needed it right away, and I had the time to accommodate him. This required a switch from PK to MK. I powered up the printer and watched as it went through its start-up routine. I printed a nozzle check and found LC almost completely gone. I did the black ink swap. Going in the PK to MK direction, the printer does not force a cleaning as it does when switching from MK to PK. When the swap completed, I initiated a cleaning of the LC/VLM pair. That successfully cleared the LC nozzles; no other nozzle issues were found.

I set up the print job, which was for ten of the same print. I set the quantity to five, and then moved to the printer to start feeding sheets. The first print started normally, but when about one-third complete, it ejected from the printer. The LCD showed "Resetting, please wait..." Uh-oh. This is the problem Dean reported.

I removed the sheet of paper, and then at the computer canceled the job. I found no complaints or messages from the printer driver; everything looked normal. I checked the status lights on the 7900's network port and on my 16-port gigabit switch. All looked normal, no change from the way things have appeared for more than a year.

Once again I set up the print job, this time with a quantity of one, and for plain paper. I fed a sheet of plain bond and once again got the resetting error. In addition, I'd made a mistake with the layout, setting the sheet orientation incorrectly, so this test would have failed anyway.

OK, third time's a charm, right? I set up the job again, quantity of one, with the proper mat paper and the correct orientation. The print was perfect. I set up again, quantity of two, and got two perfect prints. I finished the first half of the job by printing two more copies, also without problems.

Finally, I set up again, quantity of five, and got five perfect prints.

I'm in the dark on this. No idea what failed or why. The Mac OS keeps logs of everything (perhaps Windows does, too). I found this in the CUPS (print architecture) log:

E [16/Dec/2012:16:22:01 -0700] [Job 19] Remote host did not accept data file (2).
E [16/Dec/2012:16:31:48 -0700] [Job 20] Remote host did not accept data file (2).

It corresponds to the times I saw the errors on the printer, but it's otherwise not real helpful. A quick look with Google didn't provide any help decoding the CUPS messages. More research required. I also checked the job history in the print driver. No errors are listed; it seems this is not a log in which errors would appear.

  --Jay

Printing with Photoshop CS6

As described at length in my last posting, I'm now using the most recent Mac OS (OS X 10.8.2, "Mountain Lion") and the most recent version of Photoshop (CS6) on my Mac Pro. I'm also using the latest Epson printer driver for the Mac, 9.04, although I'd been using this for a while with older versions of Photoshop and OS X.

Today I made my first print with the 7900 and the new combination of software. I optimized my photo in the usual way; with the exception of the new (and very interesting) process version in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), that being PV2012, there's little change to my workflow with CS6. I've read from several sources that soft proofing has been improved in CS6; that may be true, but I'll need to work more with that before I can say for sure. In any case, getting ready to print is straightforward.

However, the print dialog is new, and different in several ways. I was surprised at the new layout of the print dialog. Having never seen the Windows version of this, I'm not sure how different the Mac version is. In the previous version with CS5, a full-height right pane contained the color set-up options. To the left of that another pane had sizing, quantity, scale, and a few other options. Those two panes filled roughly half of the big dialog box. The preview pane filled the left half.

Now, all of the old set-up options (and more) are in a single, scrolling pane on the right, while the preview remains on the left. Here's the good part: the preview is surrounded by a white border, and that has edges with slash marks. By default a black background surrounds the preview. While there may be some good reasons for that black border, I thought it made the preview image appear very bright, and I didn't care for the contrast with the settings pane on the right. I discovered right-clicking in that black border exposes a menu with some gray shades and a "custom" option to set any color. I chose the darker gray. Click the image below for a larger view.

The white around the image is the print area. The slash marks, representing the unprintable area, show the edges of the full sheet. I think this is excellent. After making the print and comparing, I found this representation of the print position on the sheet to be quite accurate. You can see the total bottom border is significantly wider than the top, despite the "Center" option being checked. But it shows exactly what I'm going to get, which is a nice improvement over CS5.

In my early days working with the 7900 and its driver, I ranted here several times about the difficulty centering images on cut sheets. Look back at postings in late October through mid-November, 2011, for details. This new preview doesn't fix the centering problem (that is, checking the "Center" box in the Position frame of the dialog does NOT center the image on the sheet), but it does, finally, provide a good approximation of where on the sheet the image will be printed. This means the top margin can be adjusted so the image in the preview looks centered, and clipping of the image can be avoided. Nice!

Apparently, this is all Adobe's doing. As a test, I installed the latest 7900 driver on my MacBook Pro 15" laptop. This has OS X 10.8.2, but still has the older Photoshop CS5. The print dialog is exactly as it appeared on the Mac Pro with CS5 and the older OS, confirming the change is the result of the Photoshop upgrade to CS6.

  --Jay

OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion)

I generally don't rush in to things. I'm not an "early adopter", instead preferring to let others debug new products and software. They can be vendors' unpaid Quality Assurance if they want. After the flames have been put out and an update or two released to fix early problems, I'll have a look. I use my computer to make a living, so I suppose I'm cautious by nature.

Apple released the newest version of the Mac OS, "Mountain Lion", OS X version 10.8, several months ago. I had been using version 10.6.n since 2009; that is now two versions old. I was happy with that; it was stable, it was still receiving important updates (security patches, mostly, which, despite all the blather to the contrary, are needed on the Mac, too), and since I'd been using it for some time, it rarely presented any surprises.

Apple advertises support only for the current version of OS X, and one generation back, although they seem to be somewhat flexible with that "one generation" bit. In any case, when 10.8 was released in July (2012) I decided to upgrade. I've had a very busy year, especially spring and summer, so I'm only now getting around to installing Mountain Lion.

My Mac Pro has four bays for hard drives. I've long had three of those populated. For the new OS I installed a small HD, downloaded the OS from Apple, created a boot install drive, and then performed the installation. Quite straightforward, no issues worth mentioning. Of course, doing a clean install of an OS is the easy part, just the beginning of a somewhat longer process.

The first order of business was to upgrade my monitor profiling software, Coloreyes Display Pro, to the current version, which fixes a problem with the installer so it'll work properly with Mountain Lion. According to ICC, CED Pro 1.6 includes some minor feature enhancements and improves their LUT loader's interaction with DDC. I can attest this does seem to be the case. The software upgrade was USD $49.00.

I like to make bootable clones of the OS at intervals as I build up a new boot drive, just as a bit of insurance if something goes wrong installing or setting up new software. The version of Carbon Copy Cloner I've used for some time is not compatible with Mountain Lion. Another $45.00 hit on the checkbook fixed that.

I then downloaded the upgrade to Photoshop CS6 (from CS5). CS6 was released early this year; as I said, I'm not an early adopter! Another $200.00 spent. I was able to copy from my older boot drive most of the setting and preference files from CS5, making it simple to set up Photoshop, Bridge, and ACR in CS6 to have my familiar, customized workspaces. A few more software installations had my new, clean boot drive ready for prime time.

Among those, of course: the latest driver for the 7900. As mentioned in a posting here back in October, this is version 9.04, released in September. Installing new drivers over previous versions maintains the old version number; this is inconsistently exposed (see the October posting linked above) to the user. This is NOT the case with a clean install:

There's no ambiguity about which driver version is installed. I installed the driver, and then allowed Bonjour, Apple's device-finding technology (it's quite a lot more than that, in fact) to locate the printer and complete the setup. This took seconds. (I should mention that my printer is on our wired network).

So far I'm a happy camper, although I'm now about $300 poorer. To be fair, the Photoshop upgrade was not necessary, as CS5 is supposed to be fully compatible with Mountain Lion.

I haven't made a print in some time, so I've not yet used the new driver, nor PS CS6 to make a print. That'll change within the next week, as I've a couple of prints to make for a small commission. I don't expect any issues, but if the worst happens and I'm unable to print, I can simply boot from the old drive, with OS X 10.6.8 and PS CS5, to get the job done.

  --Jay