Borderless printing on a 7900

[cottagehunter]

Is it a good or bad idea to print boarderless on a 7900. I have about 30 81/2 X 11  calenders to do = 390 prints I can do 2 per 17" if I print boarderless. I ask because I know that both Mike and Jeff are opposed to boarderless prints and was wondering if it was a estetic or a equipment opposition.
 
Pierre

[Garrick L]

The printer is designed to allow borderless printing, so I can't see any reason to not. As accurate as each nozzle fireing is in this technology I would say go for it, but perhaps some of those that have had their 7900 longer than I might want to chime in.

[Paul2660]

If you open the door and look at the platen, you will see a series of white strips.  These are there to catch ink that sprays
over the edge of the paper if you print borderless.  Most printers you look at won't show too much ink on these, but if you do a lot of borderless printing, they will need to be replaced over time.  It's easy to do.

As mentioned before, Epson designed the printer to do borderless and unless you get a major skew error with the paper, you should be OK.  I was never able to do this with my older 9880 since it skew horribly, all 3 of them did.  Since I have moved to the 9900 borderless works fine most of the time, however occasionally I get skewing with that print also.

Personal prefs about borderless is each to their own, however I don't like it with larger prints since it makes handling them that much harder. 

Paul Caldwell

[Schewe]

I ask because I know that both Mike and Jeff are opposed to boarderless prints and was wondering if it was a estetic or a equipment opposition.

Aesthetic...I don't like touching the border of prints with ink on them...finger prints and acids from the hands degrade the image. For conservation purposes I always print with a minimum 1" border. However, that's a function of fine art printing not printing with a different purpose in mind. So print away if you want. Also note that to print borderless you must choose a paper/page size the print can print borderless on and the image size will be modified to account for the need to overspray.

[Wayne Fox]

when you say 17" not sure what you are referring to. The 7900 can only print full 4 side borderless on roll paper, on sheet paper it can only print borderless on the sides.  It supports borderless widths of 10, 13, 16, 17 and 24 inches.  So if you were printing to a 17x22 inch sheet of paper, you couldn't get 4 8.5 x 11 sheets on it.  The 17" would be fine, but you can't print the full 22".

If you have 17" roll paper, it would work.  You could print a 17x11 sheet full borderless and cut it in half.

As far as the equipment, if you print a substantial amount of borderless printing, you can over saturate the small white sponges designed to catch the overspray and end up with some issues.  Whether 30 calendars which sounds like it would involve about 180 pages would be a problem I can't say for sure, but I think it would be fine. You can exchange the sponge for one without ink on it pretty easily if it gets too saturated, I don't know if  a replacement can be ordered.

In the 4900 they designed this as a replaceable part (borderless maintenance tank) because there are a fair number of users printing borderless prints (i have several portrait studios using the 4900's).

[cottagehunter]

Thanks to all for your answers. All of my previous printing has been done with a border .  Wayne thanks for the info about not being able to print full border on cut sheets as I was unaware of that. I will be using rolls to do the printing.  Jeff when are you and Epson going to offer the print acadamey in the far north (Toronto ) again? Or maybe you and Michael could run one once he returns from the deep south. 

Pierre

[Schewe]

Jeff when are you and Epson going to offer the print acadamey in the far north (Toronto ) again? Or maybe you and Michael could run one once he returns from the deep south. 

Not in the near future...but you can hear Mike and I talk on the Camera To Print & Screen videos now...

:~)