Dear all,
My new 9900 arrived 2 weeks ago, and after doing a few routine test prints on sheets of paper, I have just tried my first large pano print on 24 inch paper.
Starting with the positive, the colors are great and, although I am on OX10.5.7, I have experienced none of the profile issues others have been plagued with. The gammut is amazing, and the detail is great too.
Now on the negative...
- The Epson people I have been dealing with are totally clueless about this printer... the guy who came to install it knew less about it than me who had just browsed quickly through the English manual. He was totally unable to answer any question on color Mgt... I am working on this with Epson Japan. I will try to get support on the issue described below though the maintenance contract I have bought with the printer... but my clear feeling is that they will be unable to help me quickly...
- The printer does seem to do self cleaning checks before most prints - this in itself might not be a huge issue,
- I see pretty awful large frequency banding on the pano prints. The paper used is the best Epson photo paper, the 250 gr glossy paper at 250 US$ a 12 m roll. I have been using the following print settings that are pretty much the default ones + alpha:
- high speed
- best possible resolution (2880 X 1440)
- best possible detail
- the paper type was correctly set on the printer
The issue doesn't show up in the first 40cm of the print, and then appears progressively to reach these unacceptable levels near the end of the 130cm print.
I don't see any micro banding so I don't think that it is a problem with clogging.
Here are some images of the issues... (banding is parallel to print head movement)
I am now testing other papers like Photorag Baryta and it seems that the problem is basically invisible on that paper.
Any idea on what is causing this problem and how it could be fixed would be most welcome.
Thank you in advance.
Regards,
Bernard