Larger Small Prints, 2-up on 13x19 Inch Sheets

Most gallery sales here are made during "tourist season", which seems to be that short period between 4 July and Labor Day (the first Monday in September). This is a beautiful place; there's lots to do here, especially outdoor activities—hunting, fishing, boating, hiking, climbing, camping, and much more. People come from around the world to visit Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks, spend time on Flathead Lake, and visit the many other points of interest in Montana and surrounding states. Many of those people fly in, rent a car, have their vacations, and then fly home. Traffic at our local shops and galleries is quite high during summer.

Logistics get in the way of selling large framed prints to these visitors. It's certainly possible to sell a large print and ship it to the buyer's home location, and it happens now and then. But people seem reluctant to do that, perhaps because of the cost of adequately packaging and then shipping the item. More often, people buy small things, things that fit in their luggage, or in the overhead bin on the airplane.

I love making large prints. I didn't buy the 7900 to make small ones. Likewise, I didn't buy previous printer, the 17-inch Canon iPF 5000, to make small prints. The Canon was my first large-format printer. I learned a great deal using it—I considered it an excellent "starter" printer.

With the Canon I made a lot of small prints, generally on 8.5x11 inch (US A) size sheets. I settled on a print size that resulted in a finished, framed and matted picture, with acrylic glazing, about 13x17 inches (33x43 cm). I could sell these at a price that seemed acceptable to buyers, and make a decent profit, despite the need for a custom frame and mat. My cost for these, with a white-core paper mat, was under $30.00. I've purchased dozens of these frames and mats.

Since getting the 7900 it's become less and less satisfying to make these small prints, but I need something to replace them, something to maintain that revenue stream. My experiment has been to increase the size, while (I hope!) keeping it easy for buyers to transport these pictures.

I now buy custom frames (Nielsen profile 11, graphite) that are about 15x19 inches (38x48 cm). The mat opening is 8x12 inches (20x30 cm). I continue to use acrylic glazing. These present very nicely. They are clearly larger than what one can make from the typical "kitchen table" inkjet printer, but small enough to fit in luggage or the overhead bin, and small enough to sell at a comfortable price for most buyers (although substantially higher than the smaller versions I made before). My cost is very close to that of the smaller prints.

I make the prints 2-up on 13x19 (Super B/A3) sheets. I made a template for Photoshop, a very simple document with guides set up to leave appropriate borders when the images are pasted in. I size and sharpen my individual files as usual, copy, paste into the template, and drag them so they snap to the guides. I then print as usual using the standard 13x19 sheet layout in the printer driver. If I uncheck the "center" box, I can adjust the top border by eye (thanks to the preview in Photoshop CS6) and get the image pair almost perfectly centered on the sheet.

13x19 sheet (on a gray countertop) with two images

After printing I cut the sheet down the center, sign the prints, and they're ready to frame.

  --Jay

Stubborn Clog

Later this week I need to change my display area at a local gallery. I have plenty of framed inventory on-hand, but these periodic refreshes at area galleries provide opportunities to print new things, or to make prints of older pictures I've not previously had time to work with.

Last February I spent a day and a night in Hot Springs, Montana. I wrote an article for my Web site about the experience of judging a photography show there. The black and white photo used in that article, of a window in the Symes Hotel, is the picture I printed today. I did a little work on it today to remove some distortion (perspective tool) and adjust the contrast a bit. I then set up to make a print on an 11 x 17 inch (US B) sheet of EEF.

I'd last printed with the 7900 on 1 February; it's not getting much use lately. When I ran a nozzle check print today I found a small clogged area in the LC channel. I did a standard pair clean (LC/VLM), and then ran another nozzle check print. This showed the LC problem had been solved, but now the LLK channel was almost entirely gone. I did a standard clean on the LLK/Y pair, which made very little improvement in the LLK channel. Thanks to a phone call, the machine sat for about 15 minutes. When I got off the phone I ran another standard cleaning of the LLK/Y pair, again with no improvement. Finally, I did a "powerful" cleaning of that pair, which eliminated the clog.

All of this took half an hour (not counting the telephone delay) and required five nozzle check prints. Wasted time, and more than a little frustrating. I've seldom had this level of difficulty clearing an ink supply problem.

Fortunately, the problem did clear, and I was able to make what turned out to be a very nice print.

  --Jay

Fun With Fog

Winter often brings foggy conditions to the valleys here in western Montana. I explain the phenomenon, describe some of the interesting shooting conditions I encounter in the fog, and show a few examples in my January article on my Web site. The photo of the wheel-line irrigator in the fog intrigues me. I made the picture just a few days ago, and spent some time working on it in Photoshop to enhance the contrast a bit in the foreground metal while letting the distant parts remain ephemeral. The picture is a good candidate for a frame and mat I have on-hand, so I decided to make a print.

The mat opening is about 15.75 inches wide x 8 inches high (40 x 20 cm). I made the print about half an inch larger than that in both dimensions. This forced me to crop a large area from the top of the frame. Creatively, that worked out well, since much of that area added nothing to the photo.

I cut a 17x22 inch (US C) sheet of EEF in half. Unlike the problem I mentioned in a 1 November, 2012, posting, I had no trouble with the paper curling this time.

I printed a nozzle check, as usual, and found VM completely missing. VM is paired with C. Both of these ink cartridges have been showing 1% for a very long time. I put new cartridges in the 7900, and then initiated a standard pair cleaning. That solved the problem. I returned the 1% cartridges to the machine.

Because the end margins would be narrow and would probably clip if I fed the sheet in the normal way, I made a custom sheet size in the driver, 17x11 inches. I fed the wide end of the sheet into the printer, and then set up the print job as usual, using portrait (vertical) orientation. The print looks fine-nice detail in the hoar-frost on the close metal section, with the detail fading away in the distance. If you're counting, there are nine wheels visible on the irrigator before it disappears completely in the fog. The print has wide top and bottom margins, with fairly narrow margins left and right. Feeding the sheet the "wrong" way allowed for those narrow end margins without clipping.

  --Jay

Paper Saving Trick

I can't take credit for this. I stumbled across it in a posting on Luminous-Landscape's Printers, Papers, and Inks forum. Thanks to someone who goes by "darlingm" for the hint. I did a little testing, cleaned-up his (or her) instructions, and posted them here.

When I print nozzle checks, I do so on plain bond paper-cheap stuff, fairly thin. I feed the page, print the nozzle check, make a couple of notes (date, and the room's temperature and relative humidity, and mark any missing nozzles). I then file the sheet for use a second time. When that time comes I turn the sheet 180° so the previously-printed pattern and notes are at the top, with the clean end of the sheet feeding into the printer. This scheme allows two nozzle checks per sheet. If I used a heavier paper I could print two more on the reverse side. However, with thin paper, inspecting the patterns as I do with an 8X loupe under strong light, anything printed on the opposite side of the sheet is quite visible and distracting.

darlingm's method allows printing multiple, up to five, nozzle check patterns on one side of a sheet, as follows:

Print the first nozzle check as usual. No "trick" involved. This puts the pattern at one end of the sheet, as usual. The next time a nozzle check print is needed, insert the sheet just as before, that is, with the previously-printed pattern going into the printer first. Feed the sheet as usual. When the 7900 is done setting it up, change the feed to roll paper, and then press the down-arrow several times, enough so the old pattern clears the printhead, putting clean paper in the head's path. Finally, switch the feed back to sheet, and then print the nozzle check as usual. Using this method it's very easy to print two more patterns on the sheet, and then feed the sheet with the remaining clean end first, to print a fourth pattern. One can squeeze in five with a little practice. That's great, but I'm a little lazy, and I find four per sheet to be plenty.

Above is a very poor photo of one of my resulting sheets. I'm an obsessive note-taker (more than a little nuts, surely); I like some extra space on the sheet for my scribbles. The top three nozzle checks were printed as described. The one at the bottom of the sheet was printed last, feeding the sheet normally.

A little excessive? More trouble than it's worth? Probably, and maybe. Still, a clever idea, I think.

  --Jay

A Blog Note, And A Small Client Job

It's a slow time for me, not much printing to be done. When the 7900 sits idle, there's nothing to write about, so new postings here have been few and far between. A friend wrote a couple of days ago, wondering if I'd let "Life With a 7900" die. Certainly not! But this blog isn't about daily postings or sharing every thought I might have about the printer. I write when something interesting, something at least somewhat related to using the 7900, has happened, good or bad.

The good news is, this slow period for printing leaves me time to get out shooting. We'd planned a long-weekend trip to Yellowstone for this weekend (now), but that fell through. Instead I've been wandering around the Mission Valley (here in western Montana), mostly photographing our abundant hawk population and the occasional interesting "atmospheric" caused by inversional fog.

Morning sun helps clear out fog over the ice of Flathead Lake in western Montana. The 

Mission Mountains make the background.

A couple of days ago I did get a small print job from a client who shoots only panoramas, that is, wide images made by stitching together multiple frames. These are fun to print. Where the sizes permit I nest them to make best use of 24-inch-wide Epson Luster. That was the case with this small order of three prints. The longest was 37 inches (94 cm), the shortest only 24 inches (61 cm).

The printer had been set up with MK loaded; I took advantage of that to make a couple of small prints of my own work on mat paper. I made the usual nozzle check, found no problems. I made my two small prints, and then initiated the MK-to-PK swap. That too completed with no problems. I then printed a nozzle check, and found VM completely absent. Odd, since the ink swap has nothing to do with that color channel. I did a cleaning on the C/VM pair, and then printed another nozzle check. A few lines in the VM pattern printed, but most were still missing. I then did a "powerful" cleaning of that same pair. That resolved the problem.

I set up and printed the panoramas without any problems.

  --Jay

Snow and Fog

I recently bought a new camera. Choices abound, requiring some research if one is to make an informed decision. For my Web site I recently wrote about making that decision. The camera arrived just before Christmas. I've been spending time working with that, so I've done almost no printing lately. The 7900 has been unused, powered-up but in standby mode, since 16 December.

Today I decided to print a photo I suspected would not make a great print. The image intrigues me; it's one I spent some years trying to get, without getting the photo I'd hoped for. As I wrote for my site back in November, the opportunity is now lost. What I have is as good as it'll get. You can see the photo in the article. It's a winter scene, photographed in extremely foggy conditions. Because of the post-processing done to increase the contrast, the image is more  noisy than I'd like. The subject is (was) something of an icon around here, something everyone in the valley would recognize. I need a couple of new prints for a show that will hang next week; I thought I'd give it a shot, see how the image prints.

Given the nature of the image, it seemed a good candidate for printing on mat paper. I have a roll of Epson Hot Pressed Natural (HPN), which is very nice stuff. Given the nature of the picture, with snow, fog, and rime on the tree, something whiter seemed a obvious choice. But I've only printed client jobs on the HPN and wanted to print one of my own images on it.

I ran a nozzle-check print as usual, and found no missing nozzles. A nice surprise, since the printer had been sitting idle for three weeks. I then loaded the roll and made the print as usual. It's small, only 15 inches high x 11 inches wide (38 x 28 cm), but I think it's quite nice. The noise is pretty well controlled; the mat paper helps with that. I suspect I could print it quite a bit larger with a good result.

I had no "resetting" issues when making this print. See the last posting for details on that.

  --Jay

"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