Digital BW, The Print

I'd hate to argue with Larry. He's got a boat load of experience more 
than I have. But.... I did find that raising my RH from 35% to 50%+ 
helped a great deal in lessening the instances of clogs, and the 
severity of the clogs that do occur. The thing that helps the most 
however, is keeping those capping station pads soaked in distilled water.

I'm using the StudioPrint RIP. I've found it to be quite a nice program, 
and ErgoSoft's tech. support (at least in the USA) is first rate. 
They've talked me through several fine tuning issues and as a result I'm 
getting really smooth prints. I haven't experienced any banding issues 
with my prints. Examined with a 10x loupe, I find many areas where I 
still can't see dots (I tend to print at 2880). So it's safe to say that 
I don't have any problems with the dither patterns from StudioPrint.

I've never used ImagePrint, so can't comment on it.

As to ink batches. I did not buy any ink in May/June last year. I tend 
to spend the springs and falls out in the field photographing, and 
process and print mostly in the summer and winter, so at that time I was 
just getting back to printing and had ink on hand.

I'm not much help, I'm afraid. You might try looking in the archives (as 
much as Yahoo will let you anyway) for the Yahoo group 
"EpsonWideFormat." There are a handful of large format PiezoTone users 
who participate from time to time, and there are clogging discussions 
(all the piggies catch hell at one time or another) that occur on a 
regular basis:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EpsonWideFormat/messages

--
Hogarth Hughes


Joel Pickford wrote:

> I thought of trying a humidifier, as the RH in my
> printing area ranges from %33 to 48%.  Larry told me
> that a range of 30% to 70% was fine (but they have
> high humidity in Vermont and have to run AC all the
> time to keep it down).
>
> Did you by any chance get a bad batch of Cone ink last
> May or June?  I heard there was a large batch that
> clogged really badly.  I may have some of this ink.
> When I tried to get up and running after the head
> replacement, it was just hopeless.  I have talked with
> quite a few other new Epson X6XX owners who also tried
> to start out with Cone and gave up.  In fact, when I
> started out with my new 7600 and Cone inks, I couldn't
> get a clean nozzle check at all in three days of
> trying.  Epson was going to send out a service tech,
> but I had to go away for two weeks, so I put them on
> hold.  When I got back, the printer miraculously
> worked after one cleaning cycle.
>
> Which RIP are you using?  I have thought of switching
> from Studio Print to Image Print for quad printing,
> because IP is generally a much better program and also
> seems to have a better dither than SP.  If anything is
> even slightly out of alignment, you very easily get
> banding in SP.
>
> Joel Pickford
>
> --- Hogarth Hughes <hogarth@...> wrote:
>
> > Not as few as you might imagine. There are a number
> > of people out there
> > with x6xx printers running Cone's inks, including
> > me. I started in
> > August of 2003, before Cone did - long before Cone
> > was selling ink in
> > chipped carts for the x6xx printers. Long enough for
> > me to learn to hate
> > filling my own carts ;-) My 7600 has been running
> > fine ever since. The
> > only serious clog I've had came from UltraChrome
> > inks in the first month
> > I had the machine, and it required an Epson tech. to
> > fix. Since I
> > installed the PiezoTones it's been pretty smooth
> > sailing, even with
> > sustained periods (three months) without printing.
> >
> > All pigment inks clog. It's the laws of physics.
> > There is no magic
> > bullet, unless it's dye inks. Other than Lyson's
> > grayscale dyes (and
> > their metamerism problems), there are no viable
> > grayscale dye inks on
> > the market AFAIK.
> >
> > IMHO, your best bet is still the PiezoTones. Things
> > you can do (that you
> > probably already know) to help with clogging are to
> > keep the relative
> > humidity over 50% near the printer (humidifier when
> > needed) and keep the
> > pads in the capping station saturated with distilled
> > water (I soak 'em
> > every week during winter).
> >
> > If you aren't going to go there again, the MIS inks
> > have legions of
> > fans. Somehow I don't think you're going to be happy
> > with a variable
> > tone inkset though... which just leads you back to
> > PiezoTones.
> >
> > I wish I had more wisdom to offer.
> > --
> > Hogarth Hughes
> >
> >
>