Black ink issues- other users or Dana?

InkjetMall Customer Support General Discussion & Misc Support Questions
41

the R1900 takes about 30 seconds to pull out the mk cart and insert the pk cart.
this is how Piezography users have been printing with the R1800, R1900, R2400 and R2880 since many many years ago.
why reinvent the wheel?

just pull out the MK to print glossy and put in the PK - GO should be in the LLK position already.
then put the MK back in when you want to print matte.
No head cleaning other than inserting the cart is required.

that’s how it is designed to be used and how it has been used for many many years.
i’m not certain why you are trying to use it in the way that you are.

42

and yes I do confuse you and jeff
but not you and tyler! :wink:
tyler i know and is a long time friend
both you and jeff i have not met - and know you only through this tech support forum!

43

I’ve been a lucky guest at Jon and Cathy’s place in Vermont 3 times, and in his company a few other times and places… I can assure you- THE NAVY SEALS OF PIEZOGRAPHY NEVER SLEEP

OCD on something else for a bit perhaps…

sorry, back to all the bummer stuff

44

I explained in #34 why I’m trying to use it the way I am.

You didn’t address the key question of when we might getting the missing P2 profiles - EEM, IGFS, ISCHW. These are pretty standard papers. Without them P2 appears like an incomplete system.

p.s. The “we look completely different” was supposed to be humorous. We do a rather droll style of humour in this part of the world.

45

We have a lot on the burners including Piezography PRO, the new 1400/1430 digital negative for silver and platinum/palladium, and re-profiling the five ink sets for P2 as well as PRO. Unfortunately, for product development, we spent the Summer printing for clients. Cone Editions Press got and is super busy right now. So, when my attention is printmaking for others - development stops.

If you would like to install P2 on your system and print the targets - I would be delighted to make your custom curves gratis.

46

Thank you. I will probably take you up on that generous offer. But first I need to obtain some NU1.

Also, it may make more sense to do it in conjunction with Jeff, as P2 curves made on his 3880 would be better. They could be used more widely, and as his printer is newer and they therefore would presumably be more linear. I can easily handle the remapping to my R1900 and relinearisation. Assuming Jeff keeps it his 3880, that is.

I do hope that your esteemed colleagues recover from their illnesses quickly. We miss them. Which is not so say that we have been unappreciative of your efforts to hold the fort, as you bring an additional element to the discussion.

47

P.s. I could always scan the targets myself with my i1, as we used to be able to, if that reduced the workload on IJM. Would be a lot faster too.

48

I think in the long run (as we say), when we see the actual targets themselves it allows us to spot potential issues and may save a lot of time. Also, the target is designed for a DTP70 auto scanning spectrophotometer - so the patches are tiny. But, Roy’s new droplet is great. I would use that perhaps with one of the other curves using your i1 and see if you can’t be self sufficient. The HPR curve is a good base. As is the Type 5. Glossy curves should be made with the target go printed.

49

I’ve sent you and Wells an email about the ink swap needed to move forward on this. Hopefully we can work something out. I’ll post separately about the switch to P2.

[QUOTE=jon;8733]the R1900 takes about 30 seconds to pull out the mk cart and insert the pk cart. this is how Piezography users have been printing with the R1800, R1900, R2400 and R2880 since many many years ago. why reinvent the wheel?

just pull out the MK to print glossy and put in the PK - GO should be in the LLK position already. then put the MK back in when you want to print matte. No head cleaning other than inserting the cart is required. that’s how it is designed to be used and how it has been used for many many years. i’m not certain why you are trying to use it in the way that you are.[/QUOTE]

I’ve been reflecting on these comments. There’s a deep irony here. It’s not clear whether you were allowing for this, but there is a mandatory head cleaning required by the printer when you switch carts on these cart-on-head printers, unlike the printers with ink lines and dampers. And this is the source of the irony. Let me explain.

Once upon a time I was printing with a 2100 (K2), printing colour on gloss and B&W on matte using QTR. However if you swap often enough then you quickly get sick of the mandatory head-clean as part of the MK/PK swap, esp at OEM small cart prices.

So I thought that having a dedicated B&W matte printer was the way to go. I researched B&W inksets and opted for piezo over the much cheaper Roark inksets because of the reputation of the latter for clogging.

This was at about the time that the 1400/1410 came out and you were talking up its 1.5pl drop size. It was an inexpensive introduction, so I had the 2100 for colour gloss and 1410 for B&W matte.

In a moment of rashness, a few years later I upgraded to the R1900, partly to get K7 rather than K6 (more on this below), but as I recall it was still all-matte for piezo at that point.

Fast forward a couple more years and you could do gloss piezo, but you have to swap MK & PK. Fortunately by the time I got around to doing this, it was known that WN1 didn’t lose any dmax on matte, and so I was in the happy position of being able to have both a colour and B&W printer and still not have to do the dreaded MK/PK swap.

But those happy times are over. Or are they?

The irony in all this is that I took up piezo precisely in order to avoid what what you are encouraging me to do. If I was prepared to “use the system as it was intended”, i.e. flush ink down the waste tube at every ink change, then I probably wouldn’t be here in the first place. That’s the irony.

As Jeff said in another thread, we’re just as concerned as anyone here about print quality. That’s why we’re here now. But speaking for myself, I have an aversion to unnecessary waste. I really don’t like flushing ink down the tubes. Yes, if we’re going to print then we’re going to have to consume ink and paper and carts - you can’t make the proverbial omelette without breaking the proverbial eggs. And not all of it is going to be productive - there are drafts, proofs, linearisation plots, unavoidable head cleans, etc. But I really object to the MP/PK swap waste.

And the 3880 is worse. If you need to do the swap every two weeks to keep the ink flowing then that’s 6ml for the round-trip each time, and over 12 weeks that’s 36 ml of ink and in six months you’d have flushed an entire cart’s worth of ink down the tubes. Seriously?

Discovering that I can get P2 to work on the R1900 was a great relief. I think it makes even more sense on the 3880. I have never seen a benefit from switching from K6 to K7 and to be honest I felt initially like I wasted my money when I upgraded to the R1900. I don’t really feel that way now, as there is a much better build and the option for gloss, but I have always regarded shade 7 as an unnecessary extravagance. Perhaps those printing a lot of high-key images in large sizes might benefit, but who else?

Why am I engaging in this rant? Because I think you have the solution already available. I think P2 is the answer. In my view, in the absence of a universal black, P2 is a less wasteful form of piezo. My suggestion is that you promote P2 to a greater extent, even in printers where you feel that it is not needed, and complete the set of P2 curves for common papers.

50

You do realize that in just normal operation 30-35% of all Epson OEM inks end up in the waste pad or waste tank? That is just with normal operation using OEM inks.

I think that trying to avoid the small amount of ink waste is about a small incremental amount of waste - rather than avoiding the 30-35%.

I appreciate your rant, none of us like ink wastage. But, it should be directed towards Epson to give you control over the amount of auto-cleans and the cleans it performs based upon time intervals, startup, and length of prints. That is where you should experiment with turning them off, decreasing ink wastage, and dialing in the amount of autocleans that best suits your environment. That’s my rant!

51

I have not forgotten the blog article you posted some years ago, in which you estimated around 50% wastage in an R2400 using OEM carts. Seven years and several generations of printers later, I still point people to that article, although based on printers that I have owned, I have a hunch that the R2400 was the worst of the bunch.

What has made a difference IMHO is the ability to use chip resetters for these head-on-carts printers. Being able to reset all the carts at each refill, I find that I get very few random head cleans. There’s not much going into the waste ink tank at all, only at refills, and it doesn’t seem that much. Keeping the printer ticking over certainly helps, and I easily deal with the odd nozzle gap with a targeted purge pattern. So in my case, regular MK/PK swaps would significantly boost ink wastage, which at the moment is minimal. Hence my concern.

Out of interest, have you ever measured the wastage on a 3880? I guess the measurements you get re the maintenance tank makes the exercise easier. With all the random noise it makes, it’s hard to tell when it’s doing a random head clean. The need to do the MK/PK swap regularly will increase wastage, and of course doing power cleans must be one of the most efficient ways ever invented by Epson to waste ink, so perhaps it’s harder to do an apples-with-apples comparison with the earlier printers.

p.s. Thank you for the offer of support, which is greatly appreciated and certainly more than I expected.