Two new P900s, two dramatically different results

[PatCastaldo]

I got two new P900s and out of the box, no profiling they're dramatically different — usually they're close enough, but this is dramatically different.

My workflow consists of, in general, using just one profile per printer so I can print once and move things around from printer queue to printer queue depending on what printer has less jobs on it at the time.

The image on the left is a lot lighter than it should be, and lacks the contrast of the one on the right. Both on the same printers P900 using the same profile. Printing to the same paper. Has anyone seen anything this dramatic out of the box on P900s before?

I'm wondering if there's something wrong with the printer or not. Has anyone else seen prints this muddled out of the box?

I could try and calibrate it, but that'll have a different profile than my other 3 P900s which would dramatically slow down production, since we usually just print to one queue w/ the same settings and then split it to save time (so I'd have to know in advance I was printing to the 4th printer, which I don't always know). So far in my history with Epsons, I've never seen one so far off. (I had 4 P800s and they were all the same out of the box).

[digitaldog]

Sorry, have to ask this first: You've done both a head alignment and checked that all nozzles are clear and clean?
You say you can calibrate the printers, I have no idea how you do this with an Epson, at least none of mine can, do you mean you have the software and hardware to build a profile for each? If so, there could be some testing you should do, not necessarily to build the profiles but to point where in color space the difference are happening.

Ideally, you'd test this with a color reference image that shows more colors, gradations etc. Can you test output with this:
http://www.digitaldog.net/files/2014PrinterTestFileFlat.tif.zip
Then either report what you see or take a shot and show us.
Pro Epson printers, those I've done colorimetric tests for profile creation (for Epson among others) show that the same printers produce differences too tiny to be visible. So it might be possible one or the other is off, but I've not seen that.

[dgberg]

Like Andrew says, is the nozzle check perfect? Looks like yellow may be an issue?

[unesco]

You can also try ColorBase2 Epson software that is made for linearisation purposes if you have any spectro with you (it works for P800, not sure about P900).

[PatCastaldo]

Thanks for the advice, everyone — and sorry if I wasted anyone's time.

I was able to get it matching the other printers; my best guess it looks like on the first few prints it wasn't taking the paper-type settings from the computer and instead using the printer-based settings. I don't know if that was a function of using the saved jobs or what, but as I was printing the test sheet that Andrew gave me, I double checked all the settings and looked at the printer and made sure it was using the correct paper settings in addition to the color profile I had set.

Sorry for the bad cell photo here (the lighting in my kitchen is pretty yellow), but you can see it's matching against the others now.

Thanks again to everyone who chimed in.