Hi all,
I can usually get to the bottom of most printer troubles eventually in time but this one is giving me a hard time. I wondered if anyone could shed any light or suggest a solution for the following:
Ive picked up for the studio an Epson 5000 which is in good order for very little money but I feel its about to end up in the bin.
I cant seem to get a linear greyscale strip from it at all.
Printer is firing cleanly on all 6 colours, and heads are aligned.
Theres no OS X driver from Epson for this model so Ive tried the following:
What I seem to get when printing a greyscale strip is it starts off nice and white then grey…gradually getting darker then before it goes completely black at the far end it lightens up on the next to last square before going black! The amount of ink going down also seems excessive.
If you profile in this state all the high densities are all freaked out and posterized.
I get a really neutral even strip using the iProof driver but it’s a really coarse dither so ok for proofing at arms length but not good for photo prints.
I havent tried the Epson OS9 rgb driver as even if i setup a spare Mac to host the 5000, you cant printer share between OS 9 and X.
If you had the Stylus RIP on, I would suggest looking at your TIV or GCR settings. You say it happens with all the drivers and RIPs?
What happens when you turn color management completely off?
Do you have the Epson 5000 plug-in for the Harlequin RIP? (or a Harlequin RIP at all?) I’m most familiar with this one, but they work very similarly most of the time.
Hi Brian,
This with colour management turned off, ie manually trying to obtain linearity prior to profiling.
I’d rather be able to print rgb straight from the Mac if at all possible and not have to go down the PC and RIP software route just yet! If I go down that route I might be better going for a 2100 or 1800 which I know will yield decent results straight from rgb driver.
I’m going to try some more with the Stylus RIP over the next few days and will come back with the results.
Hi Brian,
This with colour management turned off, ie manually trying to obtain linearity prior to profiling.
I’d rather be able to print rgb straight from the Mac if at all possible and not have to go down the PC and RIP software route just yet! If I go down that route I might be better going for a 2100 or 1800 which I know will yield decent results straight from rgb driver.
I’m going to try some more with the Stylus RIP over the next few days and will come back with the results.
If y ou are getting the same behavior from different printing methods (RIP, driver, etc) Then I would suspect something in the physical print path - the print head, power supply, etc.
Each printing method has very different methods of linearizing the printer so a software problem would not show up when printing different ways…
make sense?
Regards,
Steve
o Steve Upton CHROMiX www.chromix.com
o (hueman) 866.CHROMiX
Now got a bit closer with this thing.
I like the fine dither when using the Fiery but it tends to be a bit hit and miss linearity wise but I persevered…
After many test prints checking the grey balance I’m now getting great results using Matt paper and a PM4 profile in RGB.
Im still getting too much ink down in the dark areas when using glossy media though. Even after trying a whole different combination of settings, the dark areas are really freaked. Things improve slightly after an hour when the inks are dried but the last four dark grey to black squares in my grey test are grey then a bit darker then the same then a bit lighter then black!..wierd especially as they are clearly defined and nicely stepped when using the matt paper.
