desperate dumb question — Epson P600 front feed

[tinyshocks]

Hi,
I'm an old darkroom printer trying to make the move to digital printing, and it isn't going smoothly. My troubles are not with "processing" my RAW/tiff files and readying them to print; I've done that working with gallery and print shop folks with great results. My troubles are with the printer itself now that I own a small one.

I can not make the front feeder accept a sheet of paper. I've been on the phone with Epson tech and they weren't much help, suggested that I feed through the top auto feeder (which works but there are roller marks on the print surface that aren't acceptable). That was the best they had. I am using both Canson Platine & Rag Photographique in 310gsm weights. I have only tried the Platine and am ruining enough paper that I need to figure this out fast.

I watched an Epson video that showed a sheet being pushed into the feeder by hand to line up with a mark on the tray parallel to the front plane of the printer. I can't get the paper to even push in this far and have only attempted letter size sheets. When I got it to go the furthest into the machine it still stuck and came out with two spots of white grease on the surface. Otherwise the printer was able to take the paper in  — though not fed as deeply as to line with that mark, but it just mangled it around and returned an "out of paper" message on the touch screen.

My frustration level is high, probably because I've seen the quality of these printers with my work and yet can't get the damned thing to suck in a sheet. For what it's worth I'm cutting paper off a roll with a Rotatrim and flattening it, I've set paper handling to the thick fine art paper option on the touch screen, jiggled the platen gap btwn std and wide, and about anything else I can think of including reading through the results of a search for "epson P600 front paper feed" here.

I will be very grateful for any help that you folks can give this darkroom printer who is going fitfully into the digital age.
Thanks so much,
J

PS: What's with all the math to post? I went to art school to dodge math...

[Rand47]

This is going to sound weird, but try feeding the paper in at an odd angle “at first.”  So that one of the corners “goes over the ramp” first, rather than the trailing edge being “square to the feed mechanism.”  Then once it starts up the ramp, you can square it up to the line/mark on the front of the feed ramp.

Rand

[tinyshocks]

This is going to sound weird, but try feeding the paper in at an odd angle “at first.”  So that one of the corners “goes over the ramp” first, rather than the trailing edge being “square to the feed mechanism.”  Then once it starts up the ramp, you can square it up to the line/mark on the front of the feed ramp.

Rand

Thanks Rand, and that was amazingly fast. That enabled me to get the paper in to the line for the first time. I hit load and got a paper jamb though. Pulled the paper out and the front left edge on the feed was bent down. But the paper made it to the line with your suggestion!

[tinyshocks]

With Rand's suggestion I was able to get the paper to load but since the edges were damaged I cut it down to 8x10. The printer itself is asking me for a paper dimension and won't go below 8.26"x10.5 and the printer interface is giving me this error message if I try to go ahead with the oversized dimension:

"The paper source selected in the printer driver does not match the paper loaded in the printer.
To print on paper, remove the CD/DVD tray or thick paper, and then close the front manual feed tray."

This makes no sense to me, either the inability to enter an 8"x10" value for size or the closing of the front manual feed tray as it is closed. I think I'm going to have to find someone locally to walk me through this in person. This is way more difficult than opening a box of paper and exposing it on the enlarger. I give you folks a lot of credit for figuring this sh-t out, I may not be cut out for it.

[roseha]

I had similar problems when I first bought my P600.  I found out to my chagrin that the front fine art feed will simply not accept any paper under the size of 8-1/2 by 11 inches, or US letter size.  So I was not able to use heavier weight fine art paper in the 8x10 size that I had already bought.  Epson insists that putting it in the standard feeder will damage the printer.

I would suggest that you try turning off the Paper Skew Detect option in the printer menu on the front of the machine.  Also you may wish to raise the paper above the surface of the fine art front tray and then set it down along the line.  This helped me with 13 x 19 especially.  I also set the menu under Layout > Advanced Media Control to Paper Thickness 5 and Platen Gap Wide for thicker fine art papers.

Hope this helps a little.

[tinyshocks]

That was a frustrating discovery too, the letter size sheet requirement. I'm not sure why digital printing went with an office paper sizing standard rather than a photo paper sizing one. Turning off the skew detection was a big help and I am now printing consistently with the front feed. I'm not sure the point of the top feed for me as I'm using the 600 purely as a photo printer but maybe it will prove useful someday? Thanks!

[Dutch_Capture]

I too feed almost all my photo paper (Hahnemühle Baryta, Canson Edition Etching Rag, and the like) via the front paper feed of the P600. There's been a few extremely thin photo papers from Awagami, such as Unryu thin, that could be entered  via the front feed, to be sure, but then lots of smearing happened. Feeding them via the top paper feed worked fine for those thin papers.

[JohnHeerema]

Epson used to have a manual rear feed option on the 3800 and 3880 that was vastly superior to the front feed tray.
Unfortunately, that's no longer an option from Epson.