Looking for manual options in Epson Driver for 3880

[ckurmann]

Hi, I have just received my first photo printer an Epson 3880. (So I'm new and not very well informed.)

My first "job" with the printer started last night by printing 300 Christmas cards onto normal Paper. (Is there a more technical Term for non Fine Art Paper? I searched before writing this but did not know what to look for.)

The reason for this post is a first impression I have to the whole process. What I'm missing most is a "Manual" dial in printer driver.
On my first print the driver thought I was using some lustre Paper and it became much too dark (too much ink). I found that I can change to normal paper which I have done. Now the print details are not good enough.

I envisage a print driver that handles the logic behind receiving picture information and telling the printer head which colors to place on the paper, but I would like
a slider which controls the amount of Ink used (From 0 -> No Ink to 100 -> double what it should be) (Aperture)
a slider which controls resolution of the dots / lines (Focus)
a slider which controls drying time (Shutter speed)

I found some of these things by the effect seems small and what I didn't find was the resolution slider?

[Alan Goldhammer]

Normal paper is not coated for the best performance with this printer (in fact the only real use for normal paper is doing a nozzle check).  If I might be blunt, why would you waste costly ink on normal paper when you could have bought a less expensive printer to do the kind of job you are describing.  If you do want to print nice cards (and it's really drudgery as I do it semi-regularly), both Museo and Red River have nice card stock that will give you fine results.  If you do want to go ahead with "normal" paper, you will have to do some preliminary tests on which paper setting works best and whether the MK or PK ink is better.  There are a number of controls in the print driver that you can access to refine the results and the settings can be saved for future use.  The manual discusses all of this.

Alan

[Rusty]

I agree with Alan that you will get truely lovely prints on the appropriate coated card stock, use the manufacturer's profile, that said I have printed on plain heavyweight paper quite successfully which is fine for mass printing of cards on my 3880. I even sell cards printed this way. The lower cost allows me to sell at a price point that works for me and the retailer.
Just don't sell them as "fine art"; they are not.
I set the paper to premium enhanced matte and use MK ink. I have the ink density reduced to -20 paper thickness set to 3 and platen gap on auto
I suggest playing with the ink density to find what works best for your paper. Save as a preset.
There is a learning curve to using this printer, be methodical, re-read the instructions, repeat.

[ckurmann]

Thanks Alan and Rusty.

I very much intend to get better paper and move on from there. I also came up with almost the exact same settings as described by Rusty for printing on the available paper.
My main issue is that I needed to say I'm using a paper which clearly I'm not, just to trick the printer into setting the quality to the required level. (with clear visible impact)

I may simply be naive but I had expected a "pro" printer to be more readily configurable.
The driver I would design would have a list of all possible settings with sliders, radio choice buttons etc. which could all be set as the owner wants. Choosing a predefined paper from the Epson driver or loading one from the third party paper producers should then simply set all the configurations to the optimal values still leaving me to override as I see fit. I don't think this would be hard and don't understand that fine art producers accept status quo.
For me it's as if Canon and Nikon would only provide program modes on their top camera models and us users would fill forums about which mode is closest to what we actually want.