A Bit of a Scare

Anyone who's used this breed of printer from Epson knows the drill: there's a tiny fear every time you run a nozzle check print. Could this be the one? Could this be the start of a head clog, or ink delivery problem of other cause, from which the machine never recovers?

This is scary because we've all read accounts of exactly that happening. One color channel prints an incomplete test pattern, it gets worse with time, and no cleanings, whether standard or "powerful", resolve the problem. The "clog" is permanent. As with hard-drive failures, it's not a matter of if it will happen, but when. These machines become our personal sword of Damocles. Some people call for service, while some attempt the repairs themselves. These are complex machines; a bad nozzle check can have many causes, sometimes multiple causes. There's never a cheap fix. Some people simply scrap their machine or sell it for whatever value its parts might have.

Early this month I got a job to print 17 small prints and two larger ones. The small prints were of a black-and-white photo and would be made on letter-size sheets of Epson luster paper. The larger prints would be on Epson luster (24-inch roll).

The 7900 had been idle for 28 days. As usual I started with a nozzle check. I found scattered tiny areas of the VM and PK channels missing, so I ran a standard cleaning of the C/VM pair and the PK/LK pair. Another nozzle check showed the black channel at 100%, but VM was now missing fully half of the check pattern, much worse than before the cleaning. Next I ran a "powerful" cleaning of the C/VM pair. Another nozzle check showed a half-dozen tiny bits of the pattern still missing.

To meet the client's requirements I needed to print right away, so I did. While it's common for even tiny flaws in ink delivery to be obvious in prints, in this case the prints looked good. I suspect the VM channel cleared as I was printing the black-and-white image, but I didn't run a nozzle check after the job to confirm.

Nine days later I set up to print another job. The nozzle check showed most of the VM channel missing. Because I rarely get a good result from standard cleanings, I started with a powerful cleaning of the C/VM pair. This left a tiny missing spot in the middle of the VM channel. Once again, I ran the print job, finding no problems with the output.

Since that job I've run three more, on the 13th, 15th, and 19th of December. The nozzle checks have all been perfect, including the VM channel.

Looking back through the nozzle check prints I'd run in the past several months I see the VM channel has been troublesome far more often than any other. It's a concern, something to watch. But to put this into context, most of my nozzle check prints show no problems with any channel. "Clogs" happen, but they aren't typical. Perhaps they only happen when I'm in a hurry.

  --Jay

Another Anniversary

Yesterday marked the third birthday of my 7900, and of this blog. Making prints has become completely routine. Most of the printer's mysteries have either been solved, or accepted as part of the game. There's rarely anything interesting to talk about. Most of the time the 7900 just works. When it doesn't, the problems have been the same, namely, ink delivery issues, aka "clogs", which almost certainly are sometimes clogged nozzles, but sometimes are other reasons for ink not reaching paper.  When a nozzle check fails, it may require a single cleaning of a nozzle pair to clear. Or, it might require a "powerful" cleaning of a pair. Or, it might mean 45 minutes wasted trying to clear nozzles via various combinations of cleaning methods, and may also entail swapping low-ink cartridges for full ones, and then swapping back in the low-ink cartridges to continue with the print job. One never knows, making it impossible to budget time for any given print job. Some take minutes. Others take much longer before any printing can begin. That's life with a 7900.

Otherwise, my Epson has been pretty well behaved. It's made lovely prints. It's made money, too; if the machine failed catastrophically tomorrow I'd be disappointed, as would the client waiting for her order of 28 prints. But I'd have to admit the 7900 has paid for itself and its consumables many times.

A final tidbit for today: my machine still has the OEM "starter" cartridge for MK, obviously an ink I rarely use. That cartridge is down to a couple of percent, so I have a fresh replacement on-hand. Still, it could be some time before I need to install that.

As life with the 7900 has become more routine, postings to this blog have become fewer and fewer. There's simply been little to report other than to say it's still cranking out beautiful prints, which doesn't make for interesting reading. I hope it stays that way for years to come!

  --Jay

Firmware HN111E8

I've been traveling lately, and am about to leave again for a week. Because of recent absences I just noticed on the U.S. Epson site there’s a firmware update, from 4 September. As usual, they offer no clue what it does or why one would install it (except that it’s there, of course). Well, they DO say “This update improves printer functionality.”, which is about the same as saying nothing. On the other hand, who wouldn’t want their functionality improved? I mean, we obviously have unimproved functionality today.

Sometimes Epson sites outside the U.S. will have more detail, but it can be hard to find. Searching for the exact firmware version (HN111E8) gets me one hit, the Epson US site, leaving me still in the dark about this update.

I've still got packing to do and optics to clean before leaving in the morning, so further investigation will have to wait until I return home next week.

  --Jay

PK to MK Swap

I rarely print on mat (matte) papers. But now and then I must, usually because a client job requires it. I had just such a job yesterday. I made 36 small prints on Epson Ultra Premium Presentation Paper, known long ago as Enhanced Matte. I keep this paper in my inventory of sheet and roll stock primarily to service three clients who, for their own reasons, insist upon it.

The MK in my printer is the only remaining ink cartridge that came with the printer, a 90 ml "starter" cartridge. It's well past its expiration date. Until yesterday, the last time I did a PK to MK swap was 23 March, 2014. I swapped back to PK on 4 April.

Yesterday I initiated the swap, and then performed a nozzle check. The 7900 does not automatically clean after this swap; it DOES auto-clean after swapping from MK to PK. The nozzle check showed about 50% of the MK pattern missing. I performed a standard cleaning of the MK/LK pair, followed by a nozzle check that showed a tiny nit missing from the MK channel. I ran the print job, finding no problems with any of the prints.

When finished, MK showed 4% remaining. Obviously I need to order an MK cartridge, which will be the standard 130 ml, which will likely last as long as I own the printer. Heck, the current 4% cartridge could very well serve for many more months, although at that low a level the printer will refuse to do any cleaning that includes the MK channel, hence the need to buy an MK.

As long as MK is loaded, I'll make a few prints of my own work, These are pieces that sell reasonably well, look best on mat paper (I'll use Epson's Hot Press Natural), and which I print several of on those rare occasions when I've got MK loaded. I'll swap back to PK with the next print job that needs it.

  --Jay

My Oddest Print Job—Wrap-up

My plan to post daily while completing the job described in my last posting went the way of best-laid plans, due in part to a visit by family that took us on several day-trips. But the job got done even if my planned postings didn't; what follows is a wrap-up of what turned out to be a completely uneventful printing project.

As mentioned in the earlier posting, the job consisted of making 40 unique small prints. I'd planned to print ten per day over four sequential days.

Day two: Nozzle check was perfect. In the print studio relative humidity (RH) was 63%, quite high for here, temperature 70°F. Ten prints made, all perfect.

Day three: Due to other commitments the printer sat idle yesterday. Today's nozzle check was perfect, RH 54%, temperature 68°. Ten prints made, all perfect.

Day four: Nozzle check was perfect, RH 55%, temperature 67°. Ten prints made, all perfect.

You might think this proves the "theory" that printing daily prevents clogs or other ink delivery problems. That theory is certainly bandied about the forums and is, I think, widely accepted. I find otherwise, however. There's plenty of evidence that regular printing, while it may make for a less-troublesome life with the x900 printers, does not eliminate clogs. As proof:

I got a job to print four small (26 inch/66cm wide) panoramas. I printed these the day after I completed the movie stills job (that is, the day after "Day four" above). Studio conditions: 56% RH, 68°, right in the middle of the conditions over the days of the movie stills job. The nozzle check showed the lower 1/4 of the LC channel missing. Since standard cleanings rarely solve these problems for me, I did a powerful cleaning of the LC/VLM pair. This improved the LC channel, but still left six small voids in the pattern. I then did a standard cleaning of the same pair, which cleared the problem. The panoramas printed fine.

Two days later, after a thorough inspection of the movie stills prints, I decided to reprint five of those, after making some exposure and color adjustments to the files in Photoshop. Once again the studio conditions were similar to the previous days. Nozzle check was perfect, as were the prints.

I think I've proved only what I've often said: printing with the x900 series Epsons is a completely random experience. You can't know before you start any job whether that job will be smooth, easy, and fast, or require spinning your wheels waiting for cleanings to clear ink delivery problems. One must accept this as a condition of membership in the Stylus Pro x900 club. To make up for that, the prints are outstanding. Each of us must decide whether that's a fair bargain.

  --Jay

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

A "New" Mac OS X Driver 9.17?

According to Epson's U.S. site, the driver for OS X is shown as being updated 14 July, but the version is still shown as 9.17, which was released back in September, 2013. As usual, the site gives no information about the driver. It's not clear what, if anything, has changed to warrant a new upload date.

The downloaded file is named "epson16258.dmg".

  --Jay

Maintenance Cartridge Swap

Life with the 7900 continues as usual here. A part of "usual" is printing in batches, that is, I'll print a lot for a week or two, and then have a similar idle period where the machine sits in sleep mode, waiting for a call from my Mac Pro to wake up.

Another part of "usual" is the completely random nature of clogs, or as I prefer to call them, ink delivery issues. A month ago I ran a print job of a dozen or so prints, all in one afternoon. The printer then sat unused for three weeks. (We have a new toy, which has had us on the road perhaps a bit more than usual this spring.) When I started things up for the next print job, the nozzle check showed no issues, and the prints were fine. Three days later I ran the usual nozzle check prior to a print job, and found the VM pattern about half empty. A standard cleaning made it worse, taking out most of the rest of the VM channel. I then ran a "powerful" cleaning of the C/VM pair, which resolved the problem.

Two days later, another print job (a batch of 20 small prints, ten each of two images), and the VM channel was once again half AWOL. I find standard cleanings rarely clear a problem, so I did a powerful clean from the start, which took care of it. I don't know why VM has suddenly become cranky, but it's something I'll keep an eye on.

Prior to that cleaning my maintenance cartridge, the original that shipped with the printer, was at 1% capacity. The cleaning finished normally, and I started making prints. I printed all ten of the first image, and the first two of the second. The sheet for the next print loaded normally, but instead of printing, the 7900's LCD displayed a message indicating the maintenance cartridge must be replaced. The printer would not release the sheet; nothing I could do from the control panel, including the "e-platten" button, would drop the sheet.

Following the manual's instructions, which require powering down the printer, I replaced the cartridge. After powering back up I was able to release the paper sheet. I inserted it again, and printing continued where it had stopped. The remaining seven prints completed without issue.

The original, completely full maintenance cartridge. This weighed about three times what the new, empty cartridge weighed. I assume the cotton pads below the surface row are saturated; disassembly seemed dangerous, so I didn't attempt it.

I got two years and eight months use from the original maintenance cartridge. Time has little to do with the cartridge's life, of course. It lasted through the initial machine set-up, a great many channel-pair cleanings, and a number of PK-MK-PK swaps. Not bad.

  --Jay

Print Size Failure

Despite the "radio silence" on the blog lately, I've been making prints as usual, in quantities typical for my own work and for client print jobs, for most of this year. The 7900 has performed well, with minimum hassles. I've swapped from PK to MK and back to PK a couple of times. There's been the occasional need for cleaning head channel pairs, but nothing out of the ordinary for these machines. Until earlier this week.

I got a commission to make a small framed print of one of my snowy owl photos. The picture was made during the irruption of these birds we had here in northwestern Montana in early 2012. Looking through those archives during a recent file purge, I found the raw file and decided to do a little work on it. I liked the result and made a small print. It was still hanging on the display booth in my print studio when a visitor saw it and requested a slightly larger version. This would be framed in one of my "standard" frame sizes.

The set-up is described in a posting from February, 2013.

For this standard size I make two prints on a 13 x 19 inch sheet. The prints are 8.2 x 12.2 inches (about 21 x 31 cm), with about one inch between prints. I cut the sheet across the center, leaving half-inch margins. Margins at the top and bottom of the sheet are a little less than one inch, more than adequate for hinge mounting the prints. I mount these in mats with 8 x 12 inch openings (overmatted, so the mat covers just a bit of the ink). The resulting framed prints are economical to produce. They are clearly larger than the 8 x 10 pictures I often find in the local galleries, so I can sell them at somewhat higher prices. These are the smallest framed prints I make; they've sold quite well locally.

I set up to print the owl picture and another, as usual. When the files were sized and then optimized for printing in Photoshop I pasted them into a template I've used many times. This is a simple, empty Photoshop document with guides setup for the two prints. I drag the pictures so they snap to the guides, and then print as usual.

This has worked fine, but this time the images on the sheet were very slightly less 8 x 12 inches, which means they were too small for my mats. I've no idea why this happened. I did everything just as I have many times before, but to be sure I checked all settings, sizes, etc. It all looked right.

I've not had time to reproduce the process and make another print, but I will do that in an attempt to understand and fix the problem. To complete the commission I made a new, single print on a smaller sheet. This resulted in a print of exactly the expected dimensions. I've since made several others, all of which were fine.

  --Jay

An Unusual Print Job

This is surely the oddest print job I've had:

A woman contacted me with questions about scanning a group of slides and then making a small print of each. After sorting out details, she delivered a box containing 76 slides, more than we'd originally discussed.

I have a Nikon V-ED scanner for 35mm slides (in 2 x 2 mounts) and negatives. I don't use it a lot; it sits idle most of the time. But it's handy to have when I find a slide in my archives that warrants some work, and I do occasionally get a job to scan a small number of slides. But seventy-six! That would be a lot of scanning, as the scanner requires manually feeding the slides one at a time, adjusting the crop or other parameters, running the final scan, and saving the resulting file.

The Nikon Scan software is awful; horrible UI, slow and clunky. But it works, providing one has a Windows system on which to run it. Nikon abandoned the Mac OS a couple of years before phasing scanner production and exiting that segment of the business. On my Mac Pro I keep a hard drive partition (via Boot Camp) with Windows XP. This is used only to run the scanner. I save the scans as 8-bit .tifs, and when finished boot to the Mac OS for the post production work and printing. Each scan resulting in a file of about 55 megabytes.

The client wanted small prints for a photo album. For the standard 35mm slides, I sized and cropped to 4 x 6 inches (10 x 15.2 cm). A number of slides had nearly square film (120 or 220, perhaps); I sized and cropped those images to 4 x 4.2 inches, give or take a bit on the long side. I made print-ready files for all 76 slides.

For printing, I created a template with two rows of five images, each 4 inches wide. I copied each print-optimized file, pasted it into the template, and dragged it to snap to the guides. The resulting sheets, on 24-inch Epson Luster, were about 14 inches (35.5 cm) long.

I had plenty of time to complete the job, so I printed only a couple of sheets every-other day. As you know, these printers need to be run regularly to minimize head clogs or other ink-delivery problems. Spreading out printing of lengthy jobs, when that suits the delivery commitment, helps accomplish that.

I'd used the printer frequently in the weeks prior to starting this job, so as expected, the printing started out well. Each day's nozzle check print was fine, after which I'd print two sheets of ten prints. On the last day of printing I had one sheet of ten, plus six more prints to make. The day's nozzle check print was perfect, but the first prints to exit the 7900 were not. The problem seemed to clear itself, so I let the sheet finish. The second row of five prints looked fine, but clearly the first row would have to be reprinted. (See the leading edge, below.)

Since the last row was OK, I assumed the next sheet would print properly. Wrong! I deleted the "good" row from the template, and then re-ran the last job to print only the one row of five. The pictures in that row printed with an extreme magenta cast, indicating a problem with one of the cyan inks.

I ran a nozzle check and indeed found the LC pattern completely absent. A nozzle check print after a powerful clean (I rarely do standard cleans, as they almost never clear the problem here) of the VLM/LC pair showed the LC channel was fixed, but LLK was about 50% absent. LLK has nothing to do with LC, of course, but these printers work (or fail to work) in mysterious ways. Feeling optimistic, I did a standard clean of LLK/Y pair, which, as usual, didn't improve anything. Finally, after a powerful cleaning of LLK/Y, all nozzles in all channels looked good, and I could finally print my last row of five prints.

Yesterday I discovered I'd missed one print. I'd made 75 prints, and had to look through about half of those to discover which was missing. I made the final print, with no problems, on a small piece of luster left over from a previous job.

This job was a lot of manual work, but resulted in a happy client and a nice check.

  --Jay

Interesting Print Job

Last week I had a print job unlike any I'd done before. The client isn't a photographer. I'd printed for her late last year, a photo made by a friend. For this job, she wanted two prints that same size, about 22 inches (56 cm) wide. The picture is one that had appeared in a local newspaper two years ago. Like many newspapers, this one offers for sale prints of pictures that appear in its articles. Unlike other papers, however, they apparently don't sell prints, but provide a jpeg from which the buyer can make (or have made) prints. Sounds weird, but I didn't ask for details, so I don't know the whole story.

My client doesn't have a computer, instead doing everything from her new iPhone; she sent the jpeg to me from that. The picture, while very nice, was a tiny jpeg at low resolution, under 100K in size. There was no chance this would up-sample with acceptable quality to the desired print size. I found I was able to resample the file only to about 10 inches (25 cm) wide before things started to break down. I explained what was happening, and that I'd need a larger file if she still wanted a 22 inch print (she did). The client said she'd contact the paper and then get back to me.

Last week she did. She had a new file, about ten megabytes, to send. She said her phone wouldn't open the file. And no wonder; what she sent me was a .dng! The file hadn't been processed. The smaller jpeg had been cropped from a much larger frame. Clearly I had some work to do, and since the client was paying for it, I was happy to do it.

Using the small jpeg as a guide, in Adobe Camera Raw I cropped the .dng and then made the necessary adjustments. In Photoshop CC I completed the work and found the image resampled pretty well to the desired size at the 7900's 360ppi.

I made the two prints on Epson luster. Another happy client.

It had been about a week since I'd last printed anything. The printer behaved perfectly.

  --Jay

Ink Bay Door, Again

Early this week, at a time when the 7900 was not in use, I noticed the machine was awake, light from its LCD glowing through the machine's cover. I'd not used the printer in several days.

The message on the LCD indicated the left ink bay door was unlatched. And it was. This has happened twice before (noted here, and most recently, here), both times with the left bay door. The printer has not been moved, bounced, rattled, or otherwise agitated, we've had no earthquakes lately. There's no external reason the door should unlatch.

I have to assume there's an issue with the locking pin (or its solenoid). Perhaps the pin is a bit shorter than nominal, or the solenoid (or whatever actuator is used) is slightly out of optimal alignment. Or, there's a ghost in the machine.

In any case, I've found the left bay door unlatched three times since April, 2013.

Simply pushing the door fully closed solves the problem. The LCD returns to its normal status display, and the machine goes to sleep as it should.

  --Jay

The End of Ilford?

I can hardly believe it's been nearly two months since my last posting. An injury and brief hospital stay are part of my excuse, but just a tiny part (I'm on the mend). December was quite busy for me. I was fortunate to have several printing jobs, including one for more than 30 prints on mat paper. This was a very interesting job for a client who'd been hired to do a series on underground street racing in Havana, Cuba. He sorted through 20,000 raw files, brought me a few to work up in Photoshop, and then print. Cool stuff. I also had a couple of commissions for prints of my own work, followed by a couple more contract jobs after the first of the year. The 7900 did what it does in its usual way. Mostly it "just worked". I did have a couple of start-ups with stubborn clogs, but the usual cleanings or powerful cleanings resolved those. All's well with the printer, now several months past its second birthday.

The printer still has its original maintenance cartridge. That has finally dropped below 10% capacity, but I suspect that's still adequate for several months of normal use.

This posting on the Luminous-Landscape forums once again reports the demise of Ilford, or at least, the Ilford that produces the Gallery Prestige Fibre Silk (formerly Gallery Gold Fibre Silk, or GGFS) baryta paper. Ilford has been struggling for some time, and making bizarre business decisions during this period. They've reduced the sheet count in the boxes, raised prices to make up for that, and they've eliminated the plastic bags that had protected, at least a little, the paper from the inside of the carton. This has long been my favorite paper, but I've received enough damaged product, and have mainly stopped buying it.

My most recent purchase was of a 24-inch roll of GGFS, which was beautifully packaged by the supplier (IT Supplies), and arrived here in perfect condition.

Looking about for a replacement, I sampled Canson's Infinity Baryta Photographique. As you'll see in the LuLa postings linked above, consensus is that the Canson and the GGFS are extremely similar. My own experience confirms that. The papers are not quite identical, but if I print the same image on both, put them aside for a week, and then give them a look, I can't tell which paper is which. Close enough.

The Canson is also packaged in a more rational way, with the sheets being inside a plastic bag inside the carton. And finally, the Canson has been, so far, just a bit less expensive.

We'll see where this goes. I have a pretty decent inventory of the Ilford, but even if supplies are available for a while, I'll likely be buying the Canson as needed.

--Jay