Posts Tagged epson
Epson 7600 maintenance req 40
Posted by therider in Technology on October 31, 2010
This morning I had the weirdest telepathic experience. While starting up my 7600 for a print I was thinking about the possible things to do when the cleaning unit hits the service limit counter (it was close to end of life), and just then I saw the dreaded “Maintenance Req 40″ status on the LCD.
No panic. The print came out fine. I did a little bit of search to find out an useful information. Someone in the same boat posted his experience in a forum. When he called Epson they asked for the total prints so far. His number was about 1200. The technician told him to not bother and just reset the cleaner counter. The unit needs replacement only when page count hits near 5000. I just checked mine, it has printed 990 pages so far. So I did the following steps to reset the counter:
1. Power off printer
2. press PAPER SOURCE + PAPER FEED + CUT/EJECT buttons at the same time and keep them pressed
3. turn on the printer
4. Release the buttons
5. A hidden menu appears
6. press DOWN, “CLEAR COUNTERS” option should appear
7. press RIGHT
8. press DOWN, till “CLEANER” should appear
9. press RIGHT
10. press ENTER (CUT/EJECT button)
11. Power off printer.
The printer status still shows 990 pages so I just have to watch it hit 5000 before I bother about the cleaner again.
Solution for Epson 7600 printing in Snow Leopard
Posted by therider in Mac, Photography, Software on September 30, 2010
In the previous post I have outlined a trick to print correctly from Lightroom. While that works, LR has a weird crop issue when printing. So I continued my search to find a fix with PS.
Thanks to Doyle Yoder from a Luminous Landscape forum thread (reply #18), finally I can print right again from PS CS3. The steps are:
1. Convert to printer/paper profile.
2. Assign sRGB profile, ignore the color shift as it shows on the monitor.
3. In the print dialog, choose “Printer manages color”.
4. Because of above choice, “Color matching” in driver dialog will show “Epson color controls” automatically chosen and grayed out. Now choose NCA in the settings.
Voila. Perfect print.
Epson 7600 and Snow Leopard printing woes and solution
Posted by therider in Mac, Photography, Software on September 29, 2010
Brief update from my side is that I picked up a large format Epson Stylus Pro 7600 from a good friend of mine. As much as I was excited to own such a fine printer, I was bummed for two straight days not able to print a test image correctly from Photoshop CS3 on an intel macbook with Snow Leopard (10.6.4). I used the latest 8.19 printer driver.
I followed the standard process. Photoshop manages colors, with Bill Atkinson’s 9600 Premium Luster paper profile (9600PLU1), with Relative Colorimetric intent and Black point compensation turned on. Also NCA (no color adjustment) in the printer driver. Each and every print came out darker as if shadows quickly rushed to blackness. Also the black and white images seemed warm.
From numerous sources on the web I found out that the root cause is “double profiling” due to a bug in the print workflow. What happens exactly is that when we apply a profile in the print dialog in PS, and then go to printer driver dialog, the “Color Matching” section shows that “ColorSync” is automatically selected and is grayed out. This is not desired because ColorSync itself applies another profile depending on the paper, in my case, 7600-Premium-Luster-PK. the NCA option is also grayed out. This double profiling screws up the prints.
Many people have fixed it by pointing the default ColorSync profiles to “Generic RGB” as if it is a null profile. But it did not work for me.
Another source said to convert the image to the paper profile, then choose “Printer manages colors”, and NCA in printer driver. Very strangely, the printer just won’t print anything with this configuration.
Then I found out a very interesting fact that in Lightroom the application print dialog and the print driver dialog are on separate buttons. I had to choose the NCA on the driver dialog first (clicking “Print Settings…”), making sure that Color Matching is “Epson color controls”, the only alternative to “ColorSync”. Then I chose the paper profile on the right side pane before clicking “Print one”, and not “Print…”. If you click the latter, the color matching will be reset to “ColorSync” and you have to undo it by choosing “Printer manages color” instead of the paper profile and click “Print…” again.
The print finally showed shadow details as desired and perfectly neutral black and white.
It will still be a PITA to prepare images in PS and print via LR, but at least the prints will be right. CS4 or CS5 might have this particular bug fixed, but not sure.
—————–
Various Epson 7600 related links:
1. Lesson: Printing Images Using an EPSON Pro Stylus 7600 / 9600 Large Format Printer and Adobe Photoshop
2. Lessons from using an Epson 7600 printer
Test prints:
1. On-sight
2. Bill’s downloads
Update: After getting the 7600 working right, the 2200 driver started giving problems. It won’t print and the utility app will not launch. After lots of research the solution that worked was to install the 2200 driver in uninstall mode before re-installing it. Then I tricked the 2200 the same way as 7600 to get it to print using paper profile and “Epson color controls”. The result came out better than what I was doing all along with “Printer manages colors” workflow. The grays are more neutral than the distinct magenta I used to get. It is still a little warm so I might still be using QTR for b/w but the color prints are gonna be better from now on.
Epson 2200 in Snow Leopard
Posted by therider in Mac, Photography, Software on January 27, 2010
The upgrade to Snow Leopard a few months back was smooth, except for one fatal thing. The colors from my Epson 2200 went from awesome in Leopard to downright awful, thanks to the third party Gutenprint driver. I only realized this mess today since I had been printing black and whites using the Quad Tone Rip (QTR) driver which kept producing neutral prints.
So I hit google and there it was, a pretty long forum thread on the very same issue. To my surprise I found that Epson indeed released Snow Leopard driver for the 2200 printer sometime in Nov 2009. I installed it, then removed and re-added the printer and voila, the colors are almost back to normal. The interface is actually much better than what I expected, and the advanced color setting panel actually worked (it was mangled up in the Gutenprint driver).
Now that I still had a little magenta cast (as opposed to horrible), I tweaked with the advanced color settings panel. Took down magenta to -9 and suddenly the grays started to look like gray. There is just one thing to be done in photoshop prior to printing. The brightness of the image has to be increased a little bit. A foolproof way to do this is to have a curves layer, with no adjustment, then setting the blending mode to screen with 50% opacity. That makes my color prints about same as what I see on my monitor. For black and white prints using QTR, the last step is not necessary, or maybe about 20% opacity will do.
Looking forward to some print sessions in the coming days.
Update: Magenta -12 works even better.
Epson V500 and coming back to film
Posted by therider in Photography on October 27, 2009
I used 35mm film extensively since 2003 till about 2005 when I bought my first digital SLR, a Nikon D70. In those days I was pretty much brainwashed with all the digital hype like everybody else. The film workflow was lengthy. Mail order slides and B/W took about 2 weeks to arrive. Good film scanners were expensive and did not seem worth more than a DSLR. I had to retire film for a while. Back in those days I was doing event and sports photography for the graduate school newspaper and digital was just the right tool for the task.
Fast forward 3 years. I live in the bay area, close to San Francisco and many scenic places. I occasionally photograph events and portraits but other than that I am mostly drawn to making fine art images. Not that digital can’t do it, but film imparts a special character to the process. Anyone who has seen glowing color slides on a light table or made black and white silver gelatin prints in the chemical darkroom, can immediately understand my point. Film is tangible, unlike digital files. You don’t need a computer to have fun with film. To enjoy the photography even more, I picked up a battered Mamiya RB67 medium format film SLR. I like it so much I am going to shoot medium format film for as long as it is available and affordable.
I have right now about 30 boxes of 35mm color slides, countless 35mm color and b/w negatives, and more than a dozen medium format slides and b/w negatives. And this collection is going to grow.
Glad I waited all these years for a good affordable scanner, and the Epson V500 can be considered the home run. Short of 4×5 scanning (I don’t think I have enough patience to go up to 4×5) this one has everything I need. I just did my first few scans and for the first time I was able to appreciate 16 bit black and white images. The tonal gradations are very tolerant of drastic adjustments unlike 8 bit where it would lose detail pretty quickly.
I guess it will be interesting to dig through my old films. Lots of memories from Long Island, and maybe a few surprise images. I will see.
P.S. I can’t deny the evil influence of my coworker Ken (@wirehead) in making me a medium format fanatic, not to mention his showing off velvia 6×7 slides of women in fishnets doing light painting in the middle of nowhere 
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Hi, I'm Joy, a Javascript engineer at Zoosk. While code pays my bills, I enjoy hang gliding, photography, motorcycling, woodworking and home renovation. Welcome to my blog.
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