Challenges optimizing 3880

InkjetMall Customer Support Printer Maintenance & Cartridges
1

Hi, I recently flushed and converted my old 3880 to Piezography Pro. I am trying to improve the output, at the moment I’m not very happy with the uniformity of the dithering compared to the Canon I have been using for B&W. There’s some weird patterns that I originally thought was a limitation of the 3880 but I am now concerned is a configuration issue. I’ve noticed 3 weird things, perhaps someone can shed some light on it.

  1. Print head alignment: I did this before I switched, got a slightly different answer after flushing and cleaning the print head. What’s weird is that the two lines aren’t exactly parallel. They are offset slightly different at the top and bottom of the alignment target. I obviously don’t know how to adjust the twist other than trying to clean the print head manually and see if it jiggles something.

  2. Paper thickness: I know the paper I’m using (Harman by Hahn Gloss Baryta) is 0.32mm thick (I even checked with digital calipers) but when I do the paper thickness test, value 1 (which should be 0.1mm) is a clear winner. Switching between 1 and 3 doesn’t seem to make a difference. I’ve tried adjusting the print head alignmennt using this thickness and get different answers.

  3. Paper feed: This is may be an issue as I had never tried setting this before and I feel the dithering is a bit light in bands perpendicular to the paper movement if I print at 1440 super. If I print a fixed size image and measure it was 0.2% too long so I set it to -0.2%. It looks like the LFP Remote tool can’t update the printer settings for some reason so its tool to search for a value doesn’t work. Printing a gradient at 2880 I can see a change in dither “grit” for lack of a better word and through my own trial and error it’s smoothest somewhere around -0.1% but that doesn’t eliminate the patterns in the dither.

Anyhow, if it helps, my computing environment is macOS Catalina, driver 10.90, I updated my 3880 firmware (for the first time in a decade) to see if that helps, it’s now on P030D8.

Anyone have any suggestions on other things I can try to get the output where I want it?

Thanks, Ryan

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