The Epson tech was at my house for the second time today (and it is a 5 hr drive), this time to replace the printhead because of recurrent nozzle clogs isolated to just the green that were unrelieved even with power cleanings. He did a great job and the nozzle problem appears fixed. But something else came up and I am hoping that someone out there might take a few seconds to confirm what Epson is telling me and the tech.
He noticed that after all the head alignments were done and all parameters checked out OK that he was generating a test print on doubleweight matte paper and that the blackest ink (that is to say photo black or matte black....doesn't matter which the printer is set to as long as the driver says doubleweight matte paper (if the photo black ink is currently being used the LCD gives you a reminder that it is the wrong ink but then you can just print anyway) that the blackest black prints as a ghost image.....you get a second image set off by a few mm. If you set the driver to indicate any other matte type paper this does NOT occur even when you keep the doubleweight matte paper in the printer. It doesn't occur if you set the driver to any non-matte photo paper. The same occured even after reloading the firmware and printing from both my desktop and his laptop to rule out software corruption.
After some time he was at a loss to explain it and thought he might have to actually replace the main board, but decided to call Epson. The Epson tech was also at a loss to explain it but came to the conclusion that it was a 'glitch' in the programing of the driver only and had nothing to do with the printer itself. He couldn't say with certainty but said that was what it sounded like and would probably be resolved with future upgrades to the driver.
I was thinking this would be quite easy for someone with a 7900 to confirm, as all it would take would be to print an image that is either black and white or a color image with dense 100% blacks or black text using doublewight matte in the driver (no matter what paper is actually used to print on) and see if they get the same thing. If you do that would seem to confirm a glitch....if not the glitch would seem to be in my machine.
I don't print on doubleweight matte but am concerned for three reasons:
1)Before the printhead was replaced I was getting ghost images intermittently on other media without the driver ever being set to DW matte which makes me wonder if something else is going on...however, it seemed very consistent when he was here and occurred each (not intermittently) time we printed with DW matte set in the driver.
2)I am concerned that if there is ghosting on DW matte could that screw up the head alignment somewhat since the alignment is done on DW matte. Does the printer somehow have to 'see' the alignment printout to adjust the nozzle alignment or is this all done without the printer actually 'reading' anything off the paper?
3)If it is doing that on DW matte could it be doing it to a lesser extent on other papers and thereby not giving the sharpest output it should be capable of?
If any one could do a quick test and see if they get the same driver 'glitch' I would be very grateful!
Howard