This is GREAT news!!! I’ll be interested to know how it goes as you put the thing through its paces!
Well, it
WAS great news and we had begun to "
put the printer through it's paces" yet again - until yesterday. We had attempted to do that several times over the past 8 months. After our discovery last week, the starts & stops appeared to be due to failures and corruption caused by our choice of direct connection via ethernet as described in my initial post. But, today for no good reason that we are able to discern, once again
Use Printer Settings in the driver failed to "
see" the selected custom media. It simply states "Printer Media."
So, we loaded EMI, made a slight change to the specific custom media which was not showing up and then re-saved it. This is what we had to do after installing our USB connection when it appeared that this new connection was going to work. It was as though the previously entered custom media settings were somehow rendered dormant by the issues apparently caused by the previous connection. Making a small edit and re-saving each custom media in EMI brought them all back to life. That is, with the USB connection they were all now visible to EMI and under "Use Printer Settings."
However, this time, that method did
not work. Nothing whatsoever had been changed in the MAC.
Now, believing that perhaps the length of our active USB cable (32 feet) might be a factor, we sat the MAC atop the printer and connected it by a much shorter, standard length USB cable and restarted Mac and Printer. This made no difference AND the launching of EMI wiped out all saved paper presets. We keep a backup of the pref for that eventuality. But, even that failed to bring them back. In the control panel, I changed the media setting to a standard Epson paper. "Use Printer Settings" still did not "see' it. I changed to another (Epson Premium Lustre) and it did "see" that one. I switched back to one of our custom media to no avail.
This is exactly how the system had behaved with the direct ethernet connection. So, as we all feared, the apparent simple solution of the USB connection which seemed too good to be true actually was. At least we got to see the system in correct operation for a few days. But, that's how it's been going with this thing since day one. How can we ever have faith in such a system?
Tomorrow, I will be spending much of another day on the horn with Epson in hopes of finding someone who knows the whole print system well enough that they can offer meaningful help. The printer can operate without EMI in a similar way to its predecessors. But, this would be even more difficult as half the driver settings are now only on the printer. In short, the printer works well. The system is a failure - on MAC and in our experience at least.
In the meanwhile, I'd be
very interested to learn if any other MAC user and owner of the 75** / 95** line has experienced similar issues.
Cheers,
Mick