Digital BW, The Print

mepreuss wrote:




> Is anyone else experiencing this phenomenon?  

Yeah. I did the purge you described in your last message; I also did a 
manual cleaning of the ink head with an ammonia solution as described 
elsewhere. (Like you, my printer is pretty new, still on its first carts 
of everything, and has only had MIS ink put through it.)

I am still getting the dots.

Does anyone else suspect the printer driver is messed up somehow? I've 
got a highly repeatable problem of getting microbanding at several input 
file dpi's; I think this problem is in the driver. The microbanding is 
easy enough to work around (just resample the image to an acceptable 
resolution before printing), but maybe this is just one of *several* 
driver problems. I wonder whether pseudo-random activation of a black 
nozzle is also a 'feature' of this driver.

Do black dots appear randomly in the color output of this printer using 
standard Epson inks?

I spent about an hour online today looking for an old driver. Epson 
doesn't have any posted that I can find, and none of the driver 
repositories do as well. So it looks like we are stuck with the current 
(poisonous?) driver. Anyone have anything prior to the current driver 
version 5.5 for XP?

Is anyone getting the black dots using a Mac, or Windows NT/2000?

Anyone know of a print-to-file analysis method that will reveal whether 
the printer is being ordered to fire a black nozzle by the driver? Such 
a check would help narrow things down between the driver, and the head, 
I should think. But I can't decipher the file that print-to-file produces.

--
Jeff Medkeff
Eagle River, Alaska