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