Pixiq

One common problem that I've had with the Epson 7800, and is ink stains on the right side (while you are facing the machine).  I went through many of the common techniques to clean the printer but nothing worked.  I don't want to mention them here since some are controversial.

Well, after the ink stains on the side of the prints wouldn’t go away, I bit the bullet and went to the Epson site and found out what the problem was and how to clean up the innards of the beast.

Here’s the link about what part of the printer needs to be carefully cleaned: THE MAGIC LINK.  I spent an hour with a flashlight, cotton swabs, and damp paper towels performing the surgery.  And guess what – it worked.  Not immediately – since according to my theory there was still some ink left on the bottom of the print head.  But after doing a thorough cleaning, and getting ink all over my fingers, and running a few sheets of mat paper through the printer – I was able to do a 23 x 35 inch print without any smudges.

And since I have about five more large prints to do – figuring out what was going on was a must.  If that link doesn’t work for some reason, here’s the full link:

http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/support/supDetail.jsp?BV_UseBVCookie=...

And you can take it from there.

The bottom line is that you’ve got to press something down that allows you to move the print head off to the right – and then you need to shrink your hands so that you can fit them in there and daub up all the ink that’s splattered around.  My first theory was that the ink was being picked up from the top of the maintenance tank – and that might have contributed to the problem – but by itself wasn’t enough to solve it.  In my case, there’s this rubber wiper that was soaked with black ink.  Also, the plastic that holds some of these ink pads in place had ink on top.  The pads themselves were completely soaked through with ink.  In other words – that’s why when you first get the machine it works like a charm.  And then after some fairly predictable number of print head passes, you’ve got ink in places that used to be nice and dry.

Now, whether it’s easy to take these pads out and put fresh ones in – there’s a concept.  I don’t know how tricky that is, but I’ll try and find out because it’s just going to happen again.

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WORKAROUND

Suppose, like me you do this for a living and you need to get a print out.  I did come up with a workaround.  Normally, I print through Lightroom.  But to for this workaround you need something like Photoshop.

Basic idea is to change where the printhead first sets down.  You know where the smear starts.  In other words, at some point in the printing process, the head comes up while the paper moves, and then the inkjet head comes down again.

That's where the smear starts.  So what I did was put the digital file to be printed into Photoshop, change the size of the canvas so that there was about an extra inch on the right side (where the head comes down) and draw a very very gray line there. 

Then I just slice off that part of the print.  Problem solved.

You don't want to have to do this for all your printing, but sometimes whatever method you use, it takes a while for the ink to dry.

THE MAINTENANCE TANK

And don't forget to check the maintenance tank where the ink slops off.  If that has ink sitting on top, that is another place where ink can be picked up.  You'll either have to change the tank, or take the tank out and clean the top plastic bits off well.

All of these methods have one thing in common.  Find out where the ink is being picked up, and clean it out.  Where it gets complicated is when there's more than one place where ink is being put onto the print head.  You could, for example, have hair on the bottom of the printhead, and ink slopping around ontop of the maintenance tank. 

Obviously both issues have to be dealt with.  It really is a frustrating system, because you might have ink smear on one grade of thick paper, but not on a thin piece of paper that you want to test with.

No solution for that, but just remember, that if you think you've gotten all the ink out in step 1, it could still take a few days for the bottom of the printhead or the rubber wiper to dry completely.  Which is where the workaround mentioned above comes in.

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P.S.  There are two basic methods used by inkjet printers: thermal and piezoelectric.  HP uses thermal. Epson uses piezoelectric.  Now I haven’t looked at HP printers for at least two years, but the big difference between thermal and piezoelectric (at least the last time I looked): the thermal heads and ink cartridge are bound together.  When you change the ink cartridge in a thermal printer, you change the print head.  That’s good and bad I guess.  Good if the head is clogged.  Not so good if it’s not since the ink cartridge is probably more expensive.  No?  Maybe.  Again – last time I looked.

The big drawback was that thermal printers like the HP wide-format didn’t play nice with non-HP papers.  The HP papers were meant to heat up, bubble or whatever, and then close back down again when it was cooler and drier.  So you were forced to use “thermal” paper with the “thermal” printer.  You could use other papers but your results might vary.

The piezolectric – some sort of electric charge forces the particles out – could be used with most any paper.  That was the big thing with the Epsons.  They were good at printing at just about anything.  The bad thing – yeah – when the head gets messed up – or you’ve got to deal with maintenance issues – you don’t just toss out the head and stick a new one in.  You’ve got to deal with it.

Well – that’s how I remember it.  If things have changed since then (other than the amount of cartridges the beasts now want) – then let me know.