"Borderless" Sheet centering with Epson, the continuing saga

InkjetMall Customer Support ConeColor Inks & Printing
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I’ve been scouring forums for the past few days, here, luminous-landscapes, EpsonWideFormat@groups.io, etc looking for the definitive guide to getting as close to a borderless print as possible using a 24x36" sheet on an Epson Surecolor P6000.

What I’ve garnered so far is that it is:

  1. Impossible to do a fully borderless print with no trimming required using a pre-cut sheet. You’d think that Epson would make that clear in their marketing, or that I would have realized this impossibility, but my hopes were high that printing accuracy had made some large leaps in the past ten years since I’ve done it myself in any serious way
  2. Nearly impossible to do a fully borderless print when using roll paper, though only some slight trimming on the top and bottom (portrait orientation) is required

When comparing prices at b&h cut sheets were remarkably less expensive than rolls, so I purchased several boxes of 24x36" sheets of hahnemuehle photo rag to print a large exhibition this coming May. I don’t really want to ship them back and pay more for rolls so I’ve now made it my mission to print as borderless as possible on these sheets but I am continually finding a larger border on one side. I believe that it is the trailing edge of the print as it exits the printer, which is the left side of the print when viewed in landscape orientation.

I’m currently printing from Lightroom, as this is the most convenient for me, but I can use Photoshop if necessary. Can anyone point me in the direction of a guide to settling this up accurately or take the time to write it for me themselves? I can even offer to pay you or send you a print as a gift! The color and quality of my prints are looking great, they just aren’t as centered as I’d prefer.

I’ve tried using various configurations of page setup, using custom sizes, preset sizes, slightly overscaled custom sizes, etc. Someone please help.

Thanks,
Zak

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If you have some cheap bond paper (archival interleave paper) you can tape the sheet to that with double sided tape just under the edges. Give an extra 2 inches at the back.

The backing paper would be 24.5x38 (ish). I think you can then set a custom paper size set to auto-expand borderless (or you may have to set it to something 24x(standard longer size available).

This would allow for the roller to continue gripping the paper past the end of the actual paper.

Generally when we do full-bleed prints like this we need to use a larger model than the standard max size (aka, a 44" wide printer for 24" wide paper) so results may vary. You can do 17x22 full bleed this way no problem.

best,
Walker

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Thanks Walker, I’d try that but I don’t see any way to auto expand with a custom size and I don’t see any 24xlonger standard.

I can accept making non-borderless prints with these sheets. It will be hidden under the edge of a frame anyway, I’d just like figure out how to center it on the page.

I’ve found via Epson’s website:

Note: When printing borderless, the left and right margins are 0.
1 Left/right/bottom margin: 0.12 inch (3 mm) minimum
2 Top margin: 0.55 inch (14 mm) minimum

Is there any way to override this with a hacked driver or service utility? Or even to get it centered in the middle instead of a much larger border on the top? Maybe I’m grasping at straws…

I suppose I could figure out how to get it to be .14mm on all sides so it looks even, but if I want maximum print size I’m starting to think that exchanging the cut sheets for rolls and paying 2x the cost / print makes more sense.

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There is no way to hack the back. Think about it. It’s a 45 degree slide and the paper is only held by the back rollers (no front rollers on these printers, that would damage the paper/ink when it’s this heavy). If the paper went past the rollers it would fall out of the printer at about 1" before finishing the print.

When printing sheets, no LF printer (of any brand) does 4x full bleed.

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Various rips will allow for full bleed on custom sizes FYI.

best
Walker

1 Like
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A college art lab that I manage prints routinely to a p6000 to proof inDesign booklet layouts. That requires two sided printing on sheets and they need to be perfectly centered on both sides or they don’t match when trimmed. We don’t use sheets that large but the centering is the same. Later versions of the printer driver should show a 24x36 sheet centering option in Page Setup. If yours doesn’t, just create a custom page in Page Setup where top and bottom margins match and both side margins match. The kicker is that you can’t make any margin smaller than Epson’s default for that edge. That means you get slightly less total printable area but your art is centered. If you try to print with margins less than Epson’s minimum either the job won’t go through at all or sometimes the printer will spit out something that looks nothing at all like you specified.

And yes… this all works just fine out of Lightroom as well. I print like this often to easily center an image on a sheet

Bob Smith

1 Like
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Thanks for the clarification, I hadn’t really been thinking about the physics of why it was set up that way but it makes sense now. I appreciate the insight.

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Thanks for the reply, Bob. That makes total sense. I had a feeling I was going to have to use the largest minimum default margin on all four sides if I wanted it even and this confirms it.