Using roll paper on epson 3880

[Ferp]

How does the P800 deal with roll paper?  Not the feeding part, which is not that hard to manage,  But the keeping it flat part, without any pre-flattening?  Does it use a wide platen gap for rolls, or does it leave a wide margin at the start in order to feed some additional paper through and flatten it out that way?

[Mac Mahon]

I cut 34" lengths from a 17" roll.  Flatten it by rolling backwards over a cardboard cylinder and holding it in place with rubberbands for a couple of hours. 

I feed through the rear feed of the 3880.

I set up a custom paper size (17 x 34) through Lightroom and it generally goes without a hitch.

But flattening and allowing a bit of trailing edge margin (> 1") seems to be important.  Just yesterday I had a failure (ink smear and off-image blobs at the very end of a print) because the image size meant not enough gap between image and trailing edge, and I'd not been careful enough with the flattening. 

Cheers

Tim

[Ferp]

But flattening and allowing a bit of trailing edge margin (> 1") seems to be important.

I think that's right.  I installed the P800 drivers to see if there was any changes in platen gap when using roll paper, and there didn't seem to be.  So there's something about the P800 which means you don't get this problem with that particular printer.

If the printer really is very similar to the 3880, then rather than the design of the paper path, I suspect that it's the leading and trailing edge preventing problems.  Based on smaller printers, I think there's roughly an extra 2" used at the front to ensure that the leading edge is feed into the exit rollers and hence the paper is flat.  Since it's on a roll there is a built-in trailing edge at the print the printing stops.  I've had some issues with the leading edge, but as I was printing on a longer than necessary cut sheet, I didn't have any problems with the trailing edge.

Could a P800 owner please confirm how long a lead strip the P800 uses when printing on a roll?  Is if around 2"?