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Author Topic: printing really really long  (Read 12623 times)

martin archer-shee

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Re: printing really really long
« Reply #20 on: October 31, 2013, 08:42:12 pm »

Actually the title of the thread is "printing really really long" and the op's specific interest is in the 4900 but that does not restrict the question of other printers as often there is a cross over of ideas and solutions.

Martin
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gotanikon

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printing really really long
« Reply #21 on: October 31, 2013, 10:29:38 pm »

Thanks for the tips guys,  I have a few things to look into, including Qimage, printfab, other alternatives for banner printing, and reducing resolution.

I should also mention something that I thought was irrelevant before.  The sheet we had available only had a 1" roll hole (printer needs 2 or 3" roll hole size to mount to roll feeder), so we fed it through the sheet feeder and did not use the roll feed, yes it was a little akward.  Next time we will have more appropriate roll paper available.

I will have another go in a few days time when the new paper turns up and post the solution providing it all works.  In the meantime please send through any more ideas! 

Thanks, John.
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hugowolf

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Re: printing really really long
« Reply #22 on: October 31, 2013, 11:59:13 pm »

Thanks for the tips guys,  I have a few things to look into, including Qimage, printfab, other alternatives for banner printing, and reducing resolution...

It may be worth noting, since no one has mentioned it so far (and you haven't mentioned what OS you are running), but QIamge is Windows only. If you are on a Mac, you would have to be running a Windows virtual machine, Parallels, etc.

Brian A
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JRSmit

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Re: printing really really long
« Reply #23 on: November 01, 2013, 03:12:00 am »

Check Mirage Print http://mirage.dinax.de/. They claim to ovverride the length limitation.
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Fine art photography: janrsmit.com
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Jan R. Smit

hugowolf

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Re: printing really really long
« Reply #24 on: November 01, 2013, 11:51:26 am »

Interestingly, according to this article, the printer has a maximum image length of 32767 pixels. So 7.5 feet at 360 ppi, or 10 feet at 300 ppi. So only about 55 ppi for a 15 metre print.

http://www.epson-store.de/gb/en/viewcon/corporatesite/site/224/products/mainunits/faq/8416/3249

So for a high quality print, it is either the tiling of QImage or the expense of a RIP.

Brian A
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gotanikon

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Re: printing really really long
« Reply #25 on: November 10, 2013, 07:11:57 am »

THE CONCLUSION..... IT HAS WORKED, IT WAS DONE IN LIGHTROOM.

Despite the advise here, I was unable to get a print with Qimage, maybe I needed to spend more time with it.  I have written the whole story here:


It started a bit like this like this "You know that large printer of yours, do you reckon it will print a large cartoon, like really large?".  "Sure, why not" I say, "it's got a roll function".  We were up to midnight that night with no luck from the Epson 4900.

Before I get too much further, you'll want to know more about the print.  It is a long cartoon with pixel dimensions of 2,550 x 94,488, or approximately 17 inches wide x 52 feet (16 metres) long, at 150dpi.  At the moment, you can also view it here in 20 sections. http://www.nicartoons.com/ottimeline/?id=1

Firstly I'll start with what did not work.  If you only want to know what did work, skip this section.

The paper came from office works that afternoon, it was the only place open, but they didn't have 17" roll paper, every size but 17".  The closest was a 15" brown craft paper, usually I wrap packages with it.  It's very thin, and the core size is only 1 inch, the Epson needs 2 or 3 inch, so we figured it could be sheet fed.

Mistake number 1.  This paper is very thin so feeding it into the sheet feeder was very difficult, and needed to be pushed in with a thicker piece.  2. When it did feed through it tended to get caught up inside the printer causing a very worrying paper jam at one stage (it got caught up by curling up inside and not coming out the correct slot).  3. Trying to hand hold a roll of paper and control the exiting paper at the same time, not so easy.

Learning:  Do not try to hand feed a large roll.  Do not try to print with very thin paper.

Next.  The software issues.
Printing from photoshop.
First attempt was to print from photoshop.  We set up a custom paper size of about 15" by 45 feet or so, which was large enough to print the whole image.  Hit print.  Wait.  Nothing.  Try again, nope.  I can't say what happened but it just would not print in photoshop.  Lets try some other software.

Printing from Lightroom. 
First hickup, lightroom will only import files smaller than 65,000px, so after realising this we decided to chop the image up into 10 separate files, this was done back in photoshop within a few minutes.  Images imported, go to print module.  In lightroom we tried a similar method to photoshop, used a page size of about 15" x 45feet, but this time set the page layout so that each image was aligned under the other, giving the impression of a continuous image.  This is done with the margins, cell spacing and cell size options.  It was looking good, hit print, got a print preview and it started.  Cheers all round, we were happy.... for a couple of metres.  After a short while the print just stopped.  It was about midnight.  Time to give up.  This limitation was most likely imposed by the print driver.  The epson driver is limited to 32,767 px, which is 91 inches long (2.31 metres) at 360dpi.

Printing from Qimage.
This was a new day, and we had new paper, proper roll paper 17" wide and loaded in the Epson 4900 roll feeder.  I really thought this would work.  Prior to attempting this, I had installed the demo version of Qimage, and had exactly zero experience with the program.  So thinking it would work it's magic, I set a large paper size, roll paper, correct alignment, hit print.  We see the message "processing", it's taking a while, lets go have dinner.  Half an hour later "processing".  So I can't say what went wrong here, but I had another idea.

What did work!
Lightroom attempt number two.
So, if you can only print 32,000 pixels on a page, what about printing multiple pages onto roll paper, but with no gaps in between?  It worked.  So we imported the multiple sections of image as separate images.  Head to the print module and create a paper size of 17" wide by 54" long.   This is long enough for the image to fill the page when extended to the top and bottom edges.  By setting lightroom to zero spacing, zero margins, and a cell spacing height of 54" the image stretched from top to bottom.
   

The printer was then set to roll paper (borderless), plain paper, black (ink).
 

It was looking OK.  Hold breath and HIT PRINT.

 
There was a good reason to tick the print preview box, it showed 10 separate images, each one printing right to the edge.  The printer spooled up, and off it went, about 10 minutes later we were looking at a 15 metre long cartoon, happy days!

Despite the size, this print surprisingly only used 3.5ml of ink, it was set to black which may have helped, and being a cartoon most of the picture is white.

One warning though, before printing a large colour panorama photo on expensive paper with this method, I would want to check very precisely if there are any visible lines at the page borders, As we printed it all looked seamless, except perhaps for one single, very fine white line / gap.  It was almost indistinguishable and did not matter for a cartoon, but we didn't spend the time to work out what caused this, on an expensive print I would test the method a bit more prior to printing.

I attached a picture of Nick, happy with the result.

 
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enduser

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Re: printing really really long
« Reply #26 on: November 10, 2013, 05:11:24 pm »

With an imge that size Qimage will take a long time to process.  If you wait long enough it will say "Finished processing" and after another long wait it will start printing.  If your hardware is a bit light, it will stop  processing and give an "Insufficient memory" message.
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JeffW

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Re: printing really really long
« Reply #27 on: November 10, 2013, 09:26:23 pm »

Excellent job figuring this out. I too have struggled with long panos. Now I have my solution.

One question, how did you determine that you only used 3.5ml of ink? Is this a function available on the 4900?
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gotanikon

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Re: printing really really long
« Reply #28 on: November 11, 2013, 05:48:32 am »

The ink usage is under Menu > Printer status > Job history, you can scroll through the previous 10 jobs.

My hardware should not be too limited, it's a recent 6 core processor with 32GB ram.  After waiting so long for 'processing' to finish and with no status indicator, I wasn't prepared to wait more.  Qimage should add a status indicator to the processing bar.
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Ernst Dinkla

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Re: printing really really long
« Reply #29 on: November 11, 2013, 06:40:50 am »

Qimage Ultimate supports more CPU cores. Processing depends much on the printer settings, higher qualities ask for 720 PPI input on an Epson. If you add maximum quality of interpolation for that + smart sharpening then Qimage makes a huge print file, usually far more than other applications do in that case. That gives the image quality it is praised for but that quality may not not be necessary for the line print you had to do. There is a Poster setting in the extrapolation choices for that quality.

If you loaded images that are at the other side of the resolution spectrum, say an 800 PPI resolution at the print size where only 360 PPI is asked by the driver then the Qimage Anti-aliasing algorithm usually takes too much processing time. Again it delivers good images but you probably do not need that. Shift the Anti-aliasing filter to low instead of medium that is the default. I have complained about that speed drop but Mike is an image quality fanatic and says he uses the best AA algorithms and the slider should make the compromises.

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Met vriendelijke groet, Ernst

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Ken Doo

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Re: printing really really long
« Reply #30 on: November 11, 2013, 11:28:41 am »

The ink usage is under Menu > Printer status > Job history, you can scroll through the previous 10 jobs.

My hardware should not be too limited, it's a recent 6 core processor with 32GB ram.  After waiting so long for 'processing' to finish and with no status indicator, I wasn't prepared to wait more.  Qimage should add a status indicator to the processing bar.

Actually, there is a status indicator showing the images that are being processed for printing by Qimage.  Look for it towards the bottom right of your screen.  The status bar moves along showing the percentage of the printer queue that has been processed.

Also, check your preferences settings for Qimage Ultimate.  Under preferences, you can designate if processing should enable single or multi-core processing under "hyperprocessing."

Qimage may not have the best interface, but imho the alternative (printing without Qimage) is abysmal.  Qimage makes printing easy, organizing icc profiles and printer settings---not to mention making large prints beyond the limitation set by the Epson driver.

ken

amortal

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Another Sucess Re: printing really really long
« Reply #31 on: November 11, 2013, 07:48:33 pm »

I've had success making a long panoramic print straight from Photoshop on our 4900. The original file was about 1800 by 105000 pixels, 1.1 gigabytes (an entire roll of 35mm exposed in a Globuscope and then scanned in sections).  I managed to make a 10 by 440 inch print straight from Photoshop.  I had to rotate the canvas so the image was vertical before printing, but it went through without errors.  Just gave me a warning that the image might wander over such a long length.  It did take quite a long time to print, but not too long to spool up...

Attached is an image of it tacked up.
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