Hello group,
I'll try to make this as brief as possible, however, it is somewhat complicated. I believe I read something similar to this issue a couple of years ago on this forum, but can't seem to find any related posts. A brief history - for a number of years I've been printing to 2-7600 printers from my Mac G5 and 10.5.8. My theory, if it ain't broke, don't....well you know. A few months ago I decided it was time to make a move to a newer machine and OS, so I purchased a mid 2010 refurb Mac Pro. It came loaded with OS 10.7.3, which I worked with for a while and then updated to 10.7.5. Most of my printing is done on Epson papers with the Epson canned profiles, and I found the new OS and driver quite easy to adapt to. That is until recently. There are a couple of papers and profiles which are not of the Epson family, but I've never noticed any problems with them on the G5 and the older OS. One of my customers is partial to the Ilford Gallerie Smooth Pearl and I quite like it as well. Again, no problem with the older system. For testing smaller image sizes I generally use 8.5x11 paper and get 5-2x8" test strips per sheet. As you may have guessed, I'm an old darkroom guy. And the word "old" applies in various ways
. A couple of weeks ago I was starting to test some files on the GSP paper, and as I started the first test I noticed that it was taking much longer than normal to finish. I checked the printer and found that it was still going through the motions of printing at the opposite end to the sheet, where there was no image at all. My immediate thought of course was that I had somehow screwed up a driver setting, so I checked very carefully and tried again. And again, the same result, except this time when I removed the sheet and checked it more carefully I noticed a very
very light background printing, almost like a fogging of the paper. I then printed the test on a fresh sheet and found the same issue again, very light(almost cyan) background printing. For a normal 8x10 print it probably wouldn't have been an issue, but when printing 5 tests on a sheet the background "fogging" just keeps building up, which of course adds to the colour and density of the tests. MOST STRANGE! After thinking about this situation and trying various settings I finally decided to try one of the Epson profiles. Once it finished printing the test image the printer stopped and let me unload the paper as usual. I then came to the conclusion that it was the Ilford profile that was the culprit. I sent an email to Ilford and they replied that they had heard of this situation in OS 10.6 a couple of years ago, but nothing since, so they assumed it had been fixed. I had no time to pursue it further, but recently had to run a small job on my 7600MK(a real workhorse) for which I used one of the original Atkinson profiles for an Epson paper. Again, the "fogging" issue. That was a total surprise, but my original analysis has now swung around to a possible system problem with the non-Epson profiles. I'm going to try a couple of other profiles that I hardly ever use and see if the trend continues. I suspect it will. When I get in tomorrow I'll also check the Epson profile versions and compare to the non-Epson profiles.
WHEEEW
Well that was much longer that I had wanted, but as I said, somewhat complicated. If any of you good folks who haven't nodded off while reading this have any suggestions, they would definitely be very much appreciated. I apologize for taking so much of your valuable time.
Gary