Digital BW, The Print

mepreuss wrote:



> Jeff - if you've tried this idea, let me know your results.  

Marty,

I have a heavy shooting schedule for the next couple days, then I'll get 
back to the C86 debugging. (Tomorrow, of all things, I'll be shooting 
someone wearing an apparently accurate reproduction of a very elaborate 
Elizabethan-period dress.)

Did you or anyone else getting the dotting post their driver version 
number and operating system? If so, I didn't see it.

The first thing I intend to do is locate my driver disk and see if I 
have an earlier version of the driver (prior to 5.5), and try it out. If 
I don't have an earlier version here I intend to take someone up on 
their offer to send me one and/or go on an easter egg hunt on the epson 
FTP site and find one. This just springs from my hypothesis that the 
driver is buggy, combined with a forlorn hope that an older version will 
work better.

I'm *definitely* taking a dim view of driver 5.5's ability to deal with 
source files of different resolutions, and am pretty much having to 
stick with 360 dpi at this point to avoid having banding problems.

If switching drivers doesn't help, I'll throw the Epson ink into the 
printer and see what happens. Glad I didn't throw it away. :-)

After that, I'll try a thorough re-cleaning, but I really do not think 
that is the issue. The printer was brand new, and going through the 
prints I've made I see that I've had the spotting from the first sheet 
of paper I sent through it. In some of the prints the effects aren't 
obvious (due to narrow margins and low-key subjects), so I went through 
a period where I wasn't noticing it, but the dots do appear to have been 
present from the start. These dots are about the same size as the 
largest droplet laid down by the printer in an image area, and they have 
the same shape. They aren't smeared or globbed up, so my guess is that 
the printer is actually firing a nozzle to make them.

--
Jeff Medkeff
Eagle River, Alaska