Alumajet printing - help with media settings

[Stephen G]

Earlier today I opened a box of Alumajet Satin Silver sheets to start my foray into aluminium printing. Very excited but the stuff is extra expensive over here in South Africa (think $15 per A4 sheet) so I want to avoid trial and error as much as possible. I'd appreciate help with media settings and any other tips folks are willing to share.

I've printed one sheet so far, using the Booksmart metal profile, photo black and Premium Luster 260 paper settings on my Epson 9900. This seems to fit with what I've read in all the other threads around this topic.

Colour is good but I'm getting what looks like ink pooling in the lower midtones and shadows. The brighter areas of the print are clean and smooth and really do look rather nice and I'm hoping to be able to get the entire print looking this good.

I'm going to play with ink settings and platen gaps and uni-directional printing with a long dry time and all that on Monday but it would be great if my play could be a bit more directed.

[Stephen G]

After a lot of thinking over the weekend I did two test prints this morning and I've reached a point where I'm happy with the quality of the print.

I used these settings to deviate from the defaults the driver applies when Premium Luster 260 is selected:

Print quality: 2880x1440dpi
High speed: off
Color density: -10%
Drying time: 50 (longest)
Paper thickness: 4
Platen Gap: Wider

It's a super-slow print, and it's likely I did not need such a long drying time. But I figured rather be safe than sorry. The regions I was having trouble with are now smooth.

The attachments show my first test from Friday, with the 'ink-pooling' trouble, and the third test I ran. I did not scan the second test as the only difference between second and third is the Color Density adjustment. I dropped it from 0% to 10% for the third. On the second I was getting a weird gloss differential on the darkest parts that look to me like too much ink. The color density adjustment sorted this out.

This stuff scans really dark, so the images have been brightened to show the issues I've written about.