Epson Artisan 835 - What are causing these microscopic line streaks?

[rajhlinux]

O.K. - fine - that's a great step ahead to get away with these strange spikes, the RPM option is history, you won't find that option anymore in newer drivers - like in the L805 photo printer.

You may contact farbenwerk, if they would ship to your country, or you may find a local dealer with similar special black inks.



That's pretty easy - the Epson 4 color printers - specifically those entry level workforce models like my old WF-2010W - use a black pigment ink tuned for matte papers - for a crisp and contrasty print on normal paper. This ink is not used to print black when you select glossy/photo papers , the driver mixes black from the CMY inks. This creates a weaker black level since you have the CMY inks with a lighter luminance mixed in. But if you would fill your black ink in all CMY ink channels you get what you want - printing black via the combined CMY ink channels.

Thanks for the reply. This is great news, never knew such printers works in this manner. Learning something new every day.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

You may have a look to the Printfab driver which is a kind of alternate RIP and which lets you set parameters like ink density what most regular drivers don't.

https://www.printfab.com/en/

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Here is some UV blocking dye ink

https://shop.inkjetmall.com/UV45-bl...y=38#attr=56562,36343,50139,15183,17842,17050

 

[rajhlinux]

Here is some UV blocking dye ink

https://shop.inkjetmall.com/UV45-bl...y=38#attr=56562,36343,50139,15183,17842,17050

Thank you I will try it, however 1 Gallon is a bit too much

So I've finally bought the prized professional-grade Epson SureColor P600 printer for $250 from a kind lady whose husband was a professional photographer but passed away a few years ago. I found the new ad listing on Facebook Marketplace a few days ago (it was a 4-hour, round-trip car journey). It seems to work fine, but I will calibrate it to clean the nozzles and perform alignment tests, then do PCB print tests.

The P600 came with a box full of professional photography accessories. This caught my attention, and I can only wonder what it is used for. Perhaps checking a printer's color accuracies?

 

[rajhlinux]

So I've cleaned and setup an Epson 1400 to see how well it prints the high precision PCB traces.
It did a terrible job on it. Not sharp and clear.

Now I suspect the Epson black ink channel (the physical nozzles and piezoelectric mechanism) degrades more often than other ink channels since it is the most used ink channel. Black ink is an essential color in printing.

Below are some samples:

In the picture below, it is clear that the Epson 1400's black ink channel cannot produce high-quality precision prints. It produces blurry prints, even at the micron level. The linear traces on the right are not sharp, and the two regions are too close. During the etching process, this will not yield nice results.

I'll try other ink channels, usually those that are not used often, such as Cyan and Yellow.

And I'll do another test print on the Epson 1400.

Anyhow, if anyone is curious about high-precision PCBs, our next best bet is using 14K resolution 3D resin printers. Those produce excellent UV photolithography resolution with an accuracy of 30 microns +/-.

 

[rajhlinux]

If anyone is curious why I am putting so much effort into Epson/Canon printers to make precision PCBs, it is due to the fact that I have always had a negative view of them for about ten years.

However, after seeing some prints on this thread, I became more interested and now have a more positive view of printers making precision PCBs via UV photolithography. The Epson Artisan 835, using the Cyan ink channel, produced an excellent result. So, my conclusion is that a brand-new printer is able to produce high-quality precision prints.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Your last print shows the effect of the ink spread similar to what I got as well, the edge definition is not very good and you cannot really control the track width this way. I'm pretty sure you are better off with pigment inks. But printing such graphics is not the prime job of CMYK printers in the first place anyway. But yes - there are various variables you can tune for a better result.

 

[rajhlinux]

Your last print shows the effect of the ink spread similar to what I got as well, the edge definition is not very good and you cannot really control the track width this way. I'm pretty sure you are better off with pigment inks. But printing such graphics is not the prime job of CMYK printers in the first place anyway. But yes - there are various variables you can tune for a better result.

Thanks for the reply.

I think maybe using ultra premium photo paper and transparencies can also greatly improve precision ink placement. Right now I am using regular photo paper.

 

[rajhlinux]

Here are the results from a calibrated P600.

Extremely impressed by the results. There are some areas that are not as perfect as I'd like; however, I suspect this is an issue related to the medium-quality photo paper used here and how the ink disperses on the surface. I believe that using legitimate ultra-high-quality photo paper will aid in producing much finer and sharper detail prints. This means using ultra-high-quality transparencies is a must.


Here are the driver settings used in Adobe Acrobat:

So here the results, the full printed PCB image:

Close up scans, by far the most remarkable results:

Here are some areas that are questionable... The way it is printed seems like it is an issue with the medium material rather than the printhead. I came to this conclusion because almost 97% of the print on the left side is super perfect, clean, sharp, and crisp. However, it gets a bit distorted towards the right. The medium-quality photo paper has great flex and warp to it as well.

Anyhow, based on the amazing print results, I guess I should continue and also test Epson's current professional flagship models, such as the P700 or P900. I'll give that a try as well.

From my understanding, the P600's engineering technology is about 10 years old and was released in January 2015. We are already in November, so yes, about 10 years. The newer engineering technology released in 2020 should provide at least a 20% increase in precision printing.

The Artisan 835 also produced great results. However, the P600 produces much better results. I think if I used an ink channel on the P600 that is not used often, such as Yellow, it should produce the cleanest image.

Anyhow, I will now buy all the materials needed to convert the P600 into a PCB transparency printer and detail my results on producing my first PCB board using an Epson P600. I am now convinced that when a company advertises a product as professional grade compared to their economy grade, it will indeed produce better results.

If anyone is curious, the PCB board that is being printed here is not my work. I found this design over the internet from other computer engineers making extremely complex devices. I used their work as a base reference for quality control to test the inkjet printer's capabilities in the real world. My first project for making a PCB board will be to create the complex circuitry of a smart Internet of Things (IoT) device for a foaming soap dispenser (yes, to wash my hands, please don't laugh). I've been planning on making this circuitry for over 3 years now, and tediously, manually hand-soldering them on a perf board is simply not worth my time.

What I really like is that there are 9 ink channels, which means this printer has 9 lifespans. I only need one ink channel to do the job when using high-quality UV-blocking ink. If for some reason one ink channel gets damaged or degraded, I'll simply use the next ink channel. The P600 also has the ability to convert it into a chipless ink system. It costs about $45 to get this job done. The P700/P900 requires some hardware/software reverse engineering to bypass its pesky ink cartridge authentication checks, which are not commercially available but could be done with some time.

I'll also buy Canon printers in the future for testing. Someone offered me the Canon Pro-10 for $100. I'm not sure if it is as good a printer as the Canon Pro 200.

The P600 has made me an official fan and believer in using inkjet printers for high-precision PCB prints. The simple answer is to buy the professional flagship models. I would never have thought about it 20 years ago (seriously)...

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

The track definition is getting much better now - what type and brand of inks are you using - a dye ink for the Artisan 835 and pigment inks for the P600 ? I would expect that you get would get a similar improvement if you would use a pigment black on the Artisan printer for a test . I don't think that you get such an improvement just because it is a P600, and what would be better with a P700 ? Using more inks would not make a difference for your B/W printing.