The Two Hour Print

Since my last posting (so long ago!) I've been very busy doing things I love. We've spent much time enjoying all that the mountains have to offer; I've been fortunate to capture some nice images while wandering Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks, and the Shoshone National Forest, and here where I live in western Montana's Mission Valley.

I've also been printing, a lot. In between camping trips and printing my own work I've had a number of client jobs. These have been a wild mix of photographic styles, and have required printing on both gloss and mat papers.

In the morning yesterday I completed a job printing 27 small black-and-white prints on Epson's Enhanced Matte paper. These were the client's photos, brought to me as .tifs from Imacon scans of medium-format film. We'd worked these up in Photoshop when the client visited here earlier in the week.

With that job finished, I switched the 7900 from MK to PK. This required the usual 8-10 minutes, after which I ran a nozzle check print, mainly to initiate the first of the two auto-cleanings the machine does after swapping from mat- to photo-black. The print showed some missing nozzles in the PK channel. I initiated a standard cleaning of the PK/LK pair. The 7900 auto-cleaned again, and then ran the cleaning I initiated (dumb!). The nozzle check print that followed looked fine.

I loaded a 24-inch roll of Epson Luster to print one of my images for a buyer in Michigan. Her instructions: "Print this as large as you can!" I set the image size to 21 inches high by 31.2 inches wide (about 53 x 79 cm). That's a lot of data, but the print job seemed to send from the computer to the printer very quickly. Much too quickly. The resulting print, which I canceled before it completed, is shown below. As mentioned, the paper is 24 inches wide.

Before canceling I printed enough to understand what part of the image printed. The image started printing about half-way down the 21 inch height of the picture, cutting off the top entirely, and printing a seven-inch chunk from the full width. I ejected this and cut the wasted paper.

Back at the computer I resent the print job, and got exactly the same result. This time I canceled printing sooner, since I knew from the very short time needed to send the job that it too would fail.

Having no idea what was happening, I powered down the printer, closed my image file, exited Photoshop, and rebooted the Mac. I then opened the image in Photoshop, sized, sharpened, etc., and after powering up the printer, sent the job again. With the same result.

Still clueless, I closed the image file, opened it again in PS, sized it quite small to fit a letter-size sheet. This printed perfectly, so I repeated the process to prep the full-size image, loaded the roll paper, and printed, this time with a perfect result.

Total elapsed time to get this print: two hours.  Wasted paper, a little over 36 inches (1 m).

As most operating systems do, the Mac logs all manner of events; I checked all the logs of which I'm aware, but found nothing to help understand or diagnose the problem. All attempts to print this picture show "completed" or similar.

Mac Pro w/16Gb of RAM, OS X 10.8.5, Photoshop CS6, latest Epson driver and firmware (both from September, 2012). The printer is connected via my wired network.

The good news is, the print is terrific, its in the mail to the client, and the check she'll send will go far to calm my frustration. We're flying out tomorrow for our annual visit with family back east. This is a vacation; I'm leaving the camera gear at home.

  --Jay