Z3100 cannot center picture

[Damir]

I have major problem with centering picture on my Z3100ps gp

Printer is 24" so the paper is 61 cm wide

I am printing 50 x 33 cm pictures on 61 x 50 cm paper

PS driver ad 1 cm to the length so I go 61 x 51 cm paper
if we disregard the fact that I need to cut 0,5 cm from each side, which I manage by creating new custom paper preset 61 x 49 cm picture is centered along the length but not along the width, looking at the picture as it comes out of printer picture have 1 cm wider blank at the right side of the paper

When I switch to Hp-GL/2 driver page is as it should be - 61 x 50 cm, picture is centered along the wide side of 61 cm, but now it is not centered in the length side, part which is first coming out form printer have 1 cm wider margin

I have new firmware, but was not able to install latest drivers, it turns out some error and restart Windows every time, software is Windows XP, Adobe Photoshop CS3

I know that you will advice me to use Qimage :-)

But I prefer to do work from Photoshop because there is always some tweaking of the picture before the print, as I print photographs from my students.

Thank you for help

[Damir]

Interesting note - displacement from center is not always the same. It is same in every print today, but it was different in prints made yesterday, adn totaly different in prints made day before. Realy strange.

[Vlad3]

Interesting note - displacement from center is not always the same. It is same in every print today, but it was different in prints made yesterday, adn totaly different in prints made day before. Realy strange.

Hi Damir,

Have you solved your dilemma?

I'm facing basically the same issue today, printing a film poster on 24" roll of paper. Although I checked the centering box in HP Preview window, my Z3100 still prints off-centre.

Have you used pre-set sizes in PS page set up window or custom sizes?

Please let me know,

Vlad3

[Ernst Dinkla]

Interesting note - displacement from center is not always the same. It is same in every print today, but it was different in prints made yesterday, adn totaly different in prints made day before. Realy strange.

It is unclear to me in what dimension the centering is off but if it is in the length of the sheet transport then one of the things you should check is whether the page size reported back to the driver is always the same for the same sized sheets. You already know that the tail margin on a sheet is always something like half an inch wider that the leading edge margin. There is a small mechanical switch in the paper insert side that measures the end of the sheet in "skew check on" mode. If that switch hangs a bit due to paper lint etc you may get a longer measurement than the size actually is. I do not know how Photoshop centering works but if it is based on that switch measurement it is a likely cause for faults. If you base your print page size on the first sheet measured by the printer you may experience the same problem. Measure the sheet manually instead and base the print page size on that. With dual sided printing I always make sure that that switch has no influence on the register of both prints.

The switch can be cleaned quite easily.

For centering on rolls this message doesn't have any relevance.

And I'm using Qimage :-)


met vriendelijke groeten, Ernst Dinkla

Try: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Wide_Inkjet_Printers/

[Damir]

Unfortunately I did not solve my problem yet. I print from a roll, and as I mention every kind of driver have it's own behaviour. I still fight with software - windows are resisting and do not want to install new drivers. I will try Qimage just for reference to se how printer behave.

[Damir]

Finaly - HP service manage to instal new driver, remotely over the net, and prints are now centered!!

[Unicaman]

While this isn't a real fix it may be the solution:
Set your paper size in the driver to the actual size of your media.
Use this as a canvas size in Photoshop and center your image using
Photoshop.

I have heard of this issue before and have experienced it myself
on a variety of HP printers with PS.

I will place a call to my contacts in HP to see if there is a better solution.

Can't help you with the XP/Driver/Firmware at this moment

[garyfcampbell]

I had a similar problem with my Z3200.

I was printer canvas, and I wanted exactly 1.5"s of white canvas around the image on each side for the framer to wrap around the frame.

I was maxing the width of the image to 21" on my 24" Z3200.

I set up PS CS4 a canvas around the image that was 1.5" bigger on each side and printed it on a custom paper size with 0" margins.
The image came out shifted .2" to one side, so one side had a white margin of 1.7" and the other side had a white margin of 1.3".

I fixed it by going back in and changing the customer paper size in the driver to have a .2" margin on both sides, before I was using 0".
I then had CS4 make the canvas around the image 1.3" on each side,
and the print came out perfectly centered.

So there is something important about the minimum margins of .2" on the Z3200 driver.