[Alt-photo] Epson printing tip

[Marek Matusz]

All Happy Father's day to all alt fathers. I do have a tip for printing on Epson printers, mine is 3800, but others might apply. I feel silly for "discovering " it only after years of printing. I have been working on another set of low color saturation gums (a la Chia) and printing 4 negatives each. At 11x14 size pictorico was too much in terms of cost so I was using Ultrafine Crystal CLear transparency. However some of my negatives were coming out in different size. It was curios as some of them were just narrower by a quarter of an inch (something that I only discovered during printing). Strangely enough the negative was cut off (or it's printing was cut off) so that they still matched perfectly, but left a stripe of unprinted layer on the paper. Today I came across a negative that was about 3/8 inch narrower. I really could not tell what was happening. As of some time I was putting a piece of blue painter's tape at the edge of transparency (bottom) to make sure that the printer will recognize the transparency as paper to feed it. Ultrafine transparency comes with a white tape stripe along the long edge of the sheet. I was always feeding it at the right edge of the printer (as you are looking at the front of it) thinking that that where the sensor is looking for an edge of the paper. I guess I was wrong. As soon as I placed the white stripe on the left I got a consistent print (just like it would be on paper). No need to add another tape edge along the short side. It took me so many years to fix this intermittent problem.  The other trick is to increase platen gap from a standard setting. I was seeing some stripes on the prints (venetian blinds) and as soon as I increased platen gap they went away. I think this was mentioned a couple times over the years, but I never felt the need to apply that. Anyways I finished 4 sets of negatives (4 negatives per print) and printed black layer. A very productive weekend. Marek