The tales of printing perfect DVD covers continued and finished, probably.
As in the last post about printers, I stopped when printhead on my Canon died, again. Fortunately shortly after I managed to find an Epson printer, in quite good condition, that’s capable of printing in A3+ and directly on CDs.
Lo and behold, an Epson Stylus Photo 1500W:
It’s so big, that I can’t realistically make a photo of it without reavealing things I’d rather leave to myself.
Sorry.
Anyway, it arrived filled with sublimation inks and a CISS, Constant Ink Supply System, that is not very good. It makes it essentially a L1800, but since it’s not attached to its side it has some quirks.
On the first picture You already can see the first problem I encountered.
IT. WOULD. NOT. REGISTER. INKS.
No matter what I did, there almost always was a problem with one or more inks.
It’s not its biggest problem though. That comes later.
I took me a hot hour, maybe 4, to clean all that sublimation ink and replace it with mine, normal dye ink made for printing on paper.
Okay, but what is sublimation ink?
It’s a type of ink that is used for sublimation. Duh.
But let’s be serious for a moment. This ink is used to make graphics that can be then transfered to cups, metal signs and many other things. The worst part is that it generally tends to destroy the printhead a bit faster than ‘normal’ dye ink. I didn’t know what was the number of printed pages while buying this printer, which was less than ideal, but I got really lucky. It only had ~2000 printed pages. Very nice find, if I say so myself.
OK, time for the waste ink pad. I generally used “WicReset” before, but recently a program called “reinkpy” came to my attention. It’s a free solution to the wip problems that’s compatible with most Epson printers. It’s usage and especially installation is NOT beginner friendly, but once You get it Your Epson is essentially the best ink-based printer You can own.
Cheap inks (EcoTank or 3rd party), cheap refillable carts and free wip resets.
And a printhead that doesn’t nuke itself just because.
As You can see I managed to reset this printer back to 0% wip usage. I didn’t mention that earlier, but reinkpy is just a program, it won’t clean your pad, it just resets the counter.
My 1500W aleady came with pad removed and replaced my an external bottle, so when I see it full I just unscrew it, dump the contents, reset it with reinkpy and it’s done. No additional payments necessary.
Okay, time for the main dish – printhead.
Honestly, it looks fine by me, a tiny bit clogged but ink is still wet, so there still was a chance that it wasn’t clogged-clogged.
Even though I saw that I went ahead and removed it from the printer, washed it with some clean water and put it back together.
Looks almost brand new.
I put then my ink into the CISS and printed a test sheet, hoping for the best.
YAY! IT WORKS!
Honestly, this might have been the best cleaning I’d ever done and will ever do. 2 test sheets and all nozzles are firing correctly.
I still had some problems with the CISS, I could never put in on the correct height. If it’s too low then no ink goes to the printhead, if it’s too high then printhead has too much ink and ‘blobs’ ink all over the paper.
I fixed that problem by throwing money at it – I used refillable cartidges.
No more problems with ink amount now. There is a problem with colors though.
It printed with a bad violet tint.
I kind of expected that, considering that my other Epson does exactly the same with same brand inks.
I contemplated for a few days and figured out that I needed a spectrophotometer.
Meet the X-Rite special, “???”
I named it “???” because I have almost no clue what it essentially is.
It looks like a weird Colormunki Photo, what’s more important, works like a Colormunki Photo, but there’s a problem.
It has a case that doesn’t match production model CMs coloristically and it doesn’t have the signature sticker on the bottom. I imagine it’s an engineering version or a pre-production test.
It works correctly with i1Studio, but not with ArgyII CMS. I’ve talked to Mr. Graeme Gill, but so far no joy.
Anyway, I printed some sheets that I1Studio needed for calibration and made a few profiles.
Results are honestly impressive. I’d never tell that inks I used ever looked bad with this profile.
There was only one thing I was missing at that point. CD tray.
For some reason this piece of plastic is almost unobtainable, I had to import this all the way from China for almost the same amount of money that I bought the printer for.
With this tray costing more than the printer.
I made a slightly off-centre and not exactly usefull CD! For testing purposes I used a badly burned CD of VW map for MFD2 and compared it to my genuine copy of CMR3.
Colors on this picture look not very convincing, but to be honest with better centering, different white undertone and different texture I’d not be able to tell the difference.
Basically it’s a case of “If I didn’t see a pressed disk I’d never say that it’s printed”. Good enough for me.
Well, I’m off to redo my covers and print some more. Hopefully there won’t be a post “Fixing my printer, AGAIN”.
Thanks for reading!