After years of waiting, I bought my first industrial printer. From scratch, without much help other than a manual, the key challenges are mastering the machine and the network. Revving up the beast and connecting to Macs and PCs take steps. Small steps. Lots of assumptions are dashed. Assumptions about how it should work as opposed to learning why it doesn’t and doing it the machine’s way.
I started on the Mac which has a 16 bit color workflow down to the printer driver, but moved to the PC temporarily because this was the only update for the FW image initially. The Mac versions from Epson are flowing now. The first firmware update ran for 45 minutes when I realized something had crapped out. Poor error detection in the SW. Second time the FW update took in 8 minutes, but only after horrendous network shenanigans to bring the printer online. Clearly my network needed restructuring amid my three wireless routers.
Long story short. I was able to print some of the time on both roll and sheet, as the printer slows down on big files without any feedback.
The print path on the 7900 is near vertical with a vacuum pull. Sadly gravity rules. For sheet, if you offline it, the paper drops like a rock, nearly crimping a corner – so you must be vigilant. This is weak design. The paper catcher is a torture chamber disguised as a gauze dress. First there is no clear picture to show if you have assembled it right side out. I assembled it two different ways with the plastic runners showing – which I think is right, but with those prints rocketing out, wet emulsion side down, it sends me to the drafting table to figure another solution.
I was able to print some of the time because the network is flakey. Maybe because the firmware is early? If I were a Mac-only person I could not get the job done, though I have a PC so I was successful. Keep in mind – I am one of the first to use a 7900 in the US, so I pay the price.
Although you are supposed to send jobs on either USB or Ethernet, initially I could only get results off the USB. It is not said in the instructions, but if you fiddle with the printer you will find that the network is “Disabled” by default. It seemed not to make a difference because I was talking to it in network disabled mode. To actually get ink on paper, I could only initially get data from USB. How much storage is on the printer? Nothing in the manual.
It would take me another day to rebuild my network to get it all going smoothly. But there are other issues in the meantime.
When you run rolls, the mounting is easy from the front, but it is fairly easy to mangle to bring light weight paper through the print gate. You have to extend it with 3 feet to spare. Kind of hard to do with cotton gloves. It is too bad they couldn’t write the firmware to open the platten, blast the vacuum and auto feed it through. I hate touching pristine paper.
So I pulled a first print off USB to compare to my desktop Epson 2400. Same file, same paper -Luster 13×19 sheet, both from the PC. The appearance is almost identical. The 7900 printed in half the time, imaging darker areas with good latitude, questionable on the highlight blow-out, but no noticeable enhancement coming from those orange and greens inks.
Bottom line – the Epson 7900 is an industrial “roll printer”. Sheets are possible, but the paper loading is finicky and you have to really watch it as they drop or you can bend corners. Unlike the table top Epsons, you cannot mount a stack of sheets. But with a roll – it runs big prints like a battle tank.
There is another reason this is an industrial printer. Moving it from the palette crate, into your studio, is much a thinking man’s game as a brawny one’s. Even though I asked three buddies over, with a rug over a dolly, I got it most of the way – especially through narrow doors that must be taken off the hinges. Alas the stair steps. Lifting up stairs takes three brawny men, two on the bottom.
On the second day, I came to my senses and realized it was time to run this on a Gigabit network, so I simplified the topology of my three ancient wireless routers. The studio/home giganet is now one wired Gigabit router that attaches to a 16 port switch. The switch connects Macs, Dells, two Apple WiFI Time Capsules for auto backup, and an Apple TV for large viewing. A few new RJ45 wires with good ends didn’t hurt, though I bought an RJ45 crimper and was unable to make any work. New fresh wires are the best.
With computers running clean and fast, I want to make sure the printer is a good network citizen. The key is to put every device on DHCP, which is assigned from the router. I sent a small band print, then 97 MB, then 850 MB with 16 bit color – wow. That last one took an hour on USB, but only 15 minutes on Gigabit Ethernet.
So now I have tamed the beast, now I am looking at big prints and color is a big problem. Too much color. On to look at paper profiles and work flow. More on that later.
Tips for the Newcomer
1. Buy an extra 11 ink kit. Ink comes with the printer, but 60% is used up feeding the ink hoses to the print head.
2. Every few months, visit epson.com/support and upgrade your firmware, driver and anything else you see. This is key to purchasing any new technology, as software often gets “perfected” after hardware.
3. Every time you start printing, try a small horizontal band to make sure you are have all the right paint programs and print driver settings right. Crank up to big sizes as you become confident. My biggest to date is 16 bit color, 26 bit data from the Mac 850 MB, 22″w x 33″ 426 pixels/inch. I am planning a series of 24″x60″ windshields.
4. Slow down and really take your time to read every dialog box, and hidden panel and button in detail. It pains me to say, but the interfaces for key settings are often buried. For example, the default settings are short cuts for the fast print, when you usually want to getting the best quality with a fine print.
5. This is a network printer that gulps huge files so put away your USB cable and upgrade to a Gigabit Ethernet system.
Biggest Beeves
1. If you send too big a job, there is no status on the printer data transfer. With no error message you simply wait and guess if the printer gave up the ghost. The light winks when the printer is printing, but the buzz of the print head tells me that.
2. 11 Inks, 10 hoses. The promise that this Epson would run both Matte and Photo black is only half true. You mount two cartridges, but rather than build a hose for each ink, you have to run a process to evacuate the line and insert the new ink which takes 5 minutes. They actually have a special button on the LCD to change black ink. What were they thinking?
3. Paper catch system puts prints at risk. This is a near vertical print path, so engineer your own catch table.
Postscript: I went back to my dealer and saw last year’s model the 7800. The 7900 is far sturdier and better made. Turning the roll paper cover is solid on the 7900. Taking a peak at the paper catcher assembly – plastic rails should show.
4. After many prints, that appears to be a tone transfer problem between Adobe CS4, the Mac and the 7900. It prints too dark, and the whites are blown out. At first using Photoshop Exposure of +.4 it compensated pretty well, but this blows the whites out worse.
Artist David Em’s experience of the same machine.
David Em worked into the wee hours to solve this:
July 21, 2009
Mark,
It turns out we’re not alone, lots of other people have experienced
the dark image problems with several Epson printers. CS4 seems to be
part of the problem, as well as some compatibility issues related to
various versions of the Mac OS.
Now the good news: I got some good predictable results without
overexposures. One part of the fix may have been setting the 7900 as
the default printer. Here are the other settings:
COLOR HANDLING: Photoshop Manages Colors
PRINTER PROFILE: [exact paper profile you are printing to. Otherwise Adobe RGB]
RENDERING INTENT: Perceptual
COLOR MODE: Off (No Color Management)
This seems to get things in the correct color, brightness and gamma
ranges with no blowouts. There’s still room to tweak brightness,
contrast, saturation, and so forth on individual images, but it’s
within reasonable levels. I left some samples (straight from the
files, no adjustments) on your worktable.
– David
August 8 2009
Further printing refinements.
Increase exposure .5 – Your light areas will blow. So you need to preserve them.
Select dark areas and limit output level of darks (cuts the black ink output)
Select light areas and limit white output.
