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Re: epson banding & systems




On Fri, 10 Aug 2001, Nick Makris wrote:

> Gordon,  Try some other paper; heavier, lighter, glossy, matte, etc.  That
> kind of banding is usually associated with the paper advance mechanism.

In my experience, Nick is right right right but it's even broader than he
indicates. My beginner's advice to protect one's fragile sanity when
printing negatives by Epson is do not expect human analog logic, and do
not expect that a repeat of identical materials & settings will give a
repeat of the phenomena. Forget tech support and the "manual."  But still
do not, really not despair. Just keep moving. If you carry on, odds are
the machine sooner or later, often sooner, will relent.

For instance I got dramatic banding of thin vertical white lines, like
pinstripes in a suit. Book said probably head alignment. I spent an hour
with loupe looking for non-aligned heads & trying to do what it said for
alignment repair. Nada. Nichts. Gor nicht. Rien. The test pattern did NOT
budge. I decided to try again with a different negative. Everything from
then on was nice as can be, including the file that banded.

I had however had a miss-feed before the banding, and I think that was
machine revenge for the indiginity. Later I had a different kind of
miss-feed -- the vellum crumpled hideously within the machine... which
apparently caused BLACK banding at regular intervals for a couple of
subsequent printouts -- but only in the darks. That is, I was doing a
decorative border neg with a black background and didn't even notice until
I printed it that within that black were bands of darker black, even
widths, spaced evenly. These appeared as clear stripes in the gum print,
but in due course, as I continued development, disappeared. A matching
print for the left side of the border with all settings the same, but
printed later, had no such banding. I assume machine vented & relented.

I got yet another kind of banding when printing a narrow strip of an image
on a narrow strip of paper as test to save ink & fancy vellum while I
attempted to close in on variables -- very regular, and related I'm sure
to the chunka-chunk as the paper goes down the chute. This may be
intensified when you print a strip while talking to Epson tech support, in
fact may be inevitable.  I found, however, that when you get off the
phone, printing a whole sheet may shake this kind of banding. The machine
admires your determination and perhaps wishes to express gratitude for
being fed whole sheets, not slices.

I don't recall that Gord said what he was printing on -- I never got
banding when printing on plain paper, only on vellum of one sort or
another.  I suspect Epson is really square and doesn't LIKE anything
funky.

Meanwhile, Gord, it occurs to me to wonder if it was the change of system
that really beat the banding. Maybe it was, but maybe another variable
changed at same time.... did you go back and try the original again?.

best,

Judy