Digital BW, The Print

I've wrestled with this on my 2200 with a very weird twist. I observed
it on Photorag when printing out stepwedges. I tried to make it go
away using a few techniques, which I'll describe. But then, as I moved
my head (mine, not printhead) up and down under my OTT-lite, the
streaks moved! It turned out my progressive glasses created a tiny
difraction line which just looked like roller marks! So an oldish guy
is baffled again by his (progressive) bifocals!!<g>

Here are a couple thoughts though: my 2200 came with a odd looking
spatula and some cleaning sheets. The hard copy manual doesn't even
mention them or roller cleaning.

Epson hid this procedure in the online manual, at least in Win 2000.
Here is how I get there:

click on "Epson printer Information center Icon---->Reference
guide---->Problem solver---->Print quality problems---->Printer
rollers leave unwanted marks on your documents"

Intuitive, huh?

They have some drawings of how to use the spatula and some
instructions on what buttons to press to get the cleaning sheets to
slowly run through the printer- it's a special sequence and it
advances the paper slowly, but faster than a normal print, in a
jerking manner I think I recall. They say not to use anything stronger
than water.

I experimented with wedging a plastic paper clip from the output tray
between the spring loaded sheet metal edge that carries the wheels and
rollers and the printer sheet metal bed. Shine a flashlight up the
output tray and if the 2100 is like the 2200 you will see a gap
running the length of the output between two pieces of sheet metal-
both pieces are well above the rollers. If you put the apex of a
plastic paper clip clip(biggest sized one, mine is triangular) with a
thickness of 1.6mm (1/16 inch), you will pry open that gap, and also
raise the rollers a little. Put the clip on the extreme left so that
you can put larger paper through. I never tried bigger than 8 1/2
wide, but you may be able to get 13 inch through if you're clever
without it hitting your wedge. Of course anything will do for a wedge,
I just had plastic clips handy and I could remove them easily.

Since I never used glossy, and never really had a problem, I have to
offer this as merely a novel suggestion, YMMV. You do have to be
careful that the metal plate is not wedged so high that the carriage
will not crash into it. I looked into counterbalancing the spring
(look carefully at left edge of the sheet metal plate at the square
hole)but could see no way of instaling something without running risk
of carriage hitting it.

-------
personal note-

After reading Martin's post about netiquete I see one point brought up
is signing full names and possibly posting URL. Since I've never done
either, well, okay, just remember site is > a year out of date (I'm
doing some color now), and while I highly, highly respect getting
great tonal quality and large neg size I have to sacrifice it for the
montaging freedom (i.e. I have to drop from 16 bit early in the
workflow in order to combine images in pshop and I need lots of raw
material to choose from--->35mm film or digtal). With these excuses in
mind, here is what I've been doing when I haven't been fixing clogs:

Jim Hayes 

http://www.frii.com/~jimhayes

(nice pix of me roughing it in wilds of Colorado some few years ago
with beat Mamiya C330 on bio page) 







--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Daniel Staver"
<daniel@p...> wrote:
> I spent most of yesterday testing different versions of Gimp-Print and
> QuadToneRIP with the UltraTones. I still can't get prints from
> QuadToneRIP, but I'm getting good results with the latest development
> version of Gimp-Print (4.13.14), 4 ink printing mode and Paul's 1290
> curves. I had to modify the curve a little, but basically it looks
> pretty good!
> 
> Problem is, on Ilford Smooth Pearl I get big, fat roller marks on the
> print. It's from the exit rollers, I'm not talking about the pizza
> wheels. I've tryied reducing the density of ink, but even on very low
> densities the marks are visible. I get the samme effect on other papers,
> like Epson Premium Glossy and Semigloss. They're not visible on matte
> papers though.
> 
> I've tried removing them entirely, but the rollers and the pizza wheels
> are connected in one big piece and I couldn't figure out how to get it
> out of the printer, besides I got worried that I might ruin the printer,
> so I put them back in place.
> 
> Any ideas on how to clean these rollers so they don't leave marks?
> 
> --
> Daniel Staver
> http://daniel.staver.no