I've been trying to figure out a problem that's been occurring with my 4880 since some time in the spring. I first noticed it in the attached test print with the metre stick at the top. That print is 16"x36". This image from my phone exaggerates the effect a little bit, but it is always visible in smooth tones of colour like skies. The bands are each roughly an inch wide.
I've now gone through 90% of a roll of Ilford premium lustre paper doing test prints trying to determine what it might be. I had an initial conversation with Epson about it this past week in which a tech named Jim, who seemed quite experienced said that what I was describing sounded like a hardware issue rather than something in software. He gave me the number of an authorized repair company in Calgary who I called right away. After having a not so good impression of this persons abilities/experience and after coming up with some other ideas about what it might be I was on the phone with Epson again for a couple hours doing test prints with different paper settings and different profiles and different colour settings.
They immediately thought it was a paper or profile issue as I have been using third party products, However I was able to get my hands on two sheets of Epson ultra premium lustre and using Epson profiles, was able to reproduce the effect on their media, although it did appear to be a fair bit less pronounced.
They had me do prints at the 1440 setting (or 4) instead of 2880 (or 5) at which I usually print and the wide smooth bands were not apparent at the lower setting. I suspect that the lower quality may just be masking the effects.
I've done the testing on Ilford Gold Fibre silk (17x40 roll and 13x19 sheet), Ilford premium lustre, and a couple sheets of Epson ultra premium lustre and always see the effect at the 2880 setting no matter what paper I'm using.
I spent the weekend testing on a different windows 7 computer printing from Corel instead of CS5, as well as on a macbook pro running osx 10.8.3 and all of them exhibited the wide banding. I also tried using different USB cables.
I usually set the platen gap to wide when printing on the GFS.
I've been using the GFS since I got the printer 4 years ago and never noticed the problem until late april I think it was.
I'd inquired if it might be due to having updated the firmware around the time I first noticed the problem, but the one tech I was in contact with on Friday after Jim hasd left doubted this would be the cause. I'm still a little skeptical of this as I understand firmware can do some wacky things outside of what it was designed to fix.
I asked if it might have been due to a windows 7 update I did in mid march as this did some wacky things to my OS, but again they didn't think so.
So if this is a hardware issue, has anyone seen it or dealt with repairing it at all?
One thing Jim tossed out was potentially a feed mechanism issue. But all the details in the images look as they should and I suspect a feed issue might effect these details.
The last I spoke with the authorized repair guy, he had no idea what it might be and said that they might just have to start changing parts which could have it out of commission for a month or more.
Thanks
Brian