L800 inks on the RX520....and feed problems (unrelated to the ink!)

[Ionlab]

Hi,
just wanted to post an update on my experience using the L800 inks (CMYK) to the RX520 without any custom profile. Paper used was EPSON Premium Photo Paper Glossy.
Unfortunately EPSON photo print 2.70 has dropped support for my printer and so I am unable to use the photoenhance profiles (vivid, landscape, person, night etc). So I use the Windows photo suite and do my printing from there. On the drivers I did select the EPSON Vivid profile and adjusted the saturation to +5 and (depending on the image sometimes Brightness to +5 and magenta to +5 to enhance skin tones a liitle bit)

Unfortunately because the original RX520 cyan run out exactly before printing my first photo I was not able to directly compare the two inksets

But to my UNTRAINED eyes the photos came out quite good. I mostly used the Photo setting (and not the Best Photo because I could not spot much difference and the time to print quadruples) in the printer driver. The colors were vivid, the picture looked both more lively and more colorful than the same picture printed on the WF3540. But I think the WF uses durabrite inks which are pigment based.

I did notice some muddying in mostly brown based hair details, brown leaf details but this is most apparent when looking the 10x15cm photo from up close. The strange thing is that photos coming from my A6000 look better than older photos from my DSC-P200 and I think that some of this (slight) mudding has to do with the way the image is downsampled to fit the paper.

More experimentation will be made using my soon to arrive 1500W so that I will be able to use the exact same image and settings using the OEM claria inks and the OEM L800 inks. But for the time being I am very happy with the result.

Now to the RX520 problem...The printer has a feeding problem especially when using small photo papers. The paper is firstly drawn into the printer but the printer does a reverse-forward routine in order to place the paper under the print head and during that motion I get E04 paper jam messages. It seems like the feeding rollers "slip" on the surface of the paper when doing the final forward feed. The only way to be able to print a 10x15cm photo is if I "push" the paper forward in the final phase when that feed-reverse-forward motion is executed.

The problem is much less pronounced when using A4 photo paper, but still present. Is it a roller wear issue or is there something else going on.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

thanks for your interesting information, I don't know which other inks you have used before in your printer - original Epson cartridges or other refill ? You are addressing some issue with brown colors - some muddying, brown is a mix of magenta and some cyan, and the density is most likely exceeding the
gamut of this ink/paper combination, this is quite typical with such mixed colors - you are exceeding by far the max amount of ink one ink channel can deliver because the driver is combining several inks on top of each other in several passes. To get the most out of the ink/paper combination you are using you would need to get a icm-profile made for this set , this gets the most in terms of color saturation out of this combination, and with Photoshop , with the 'out of gamut' function you could check whether the brown colors in question are out of gamut for this profile, and if they are you are the limit what the inks can deliver on this paper. Please be aware that it is not just the inks creating the good or not so good colors on the paper but the photo paper itself has a visible impact on that as well.
And there are a few questions to your paper problems - did that problem occur earlier - is the paper straight and flat, or somehow bent in a particular direction - does the problem occur as well with A4 photo papers - did you test another type of 10x15 photo paper with the same effect ? Do the sheets feed correctly when you have just a single sheet in the feeder - or the opposite - do they feed better when the feeder is filled with other sheets ?

 

[Ionlab]

Thank you for the (as usual) detailed explanation. The feeding problem is worse with more papers. The problem is not new...I have given the printer to my dad and had forgotten about it. It is less pronounced with A4 80gr papers but it is not completely eradicated. Of course A4 photo paper is much easier to "push" into position during the last feed forward motion. The most difficult is the 10x15cm photo paper, It usually takes 3-4 tries to feed the paper correctly. If the paper path is relaxed (ie 1mm from the edges of the paper) it gets a little easier. But i think I have to make a video in order to be able to demonstrate the effect.

As for profiling a friend mentioned he had a Colormunki display and by digging here I found a link to this tutorial http://www.ludd.ltu.se/~torger/photography/argyll-print.html so I will try to create a profile. I hope that that works because the Photo Colormunki is way too expensive for me. And I have already (far) stretched the budget by going for the 1500w.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

you can get profiles made by service companies, and some ink suppliers offer that as well. You can enter and keep a search running on Ebay for a used ColorMunki, there is one offered once in a while, and Ebay would send you an email for a search hit. There are some other solutions on the market using a scanner but I don't know their accuracy. Just for a test you should adjust the saturation in the driver to a minimum, and compare such printout with your normal one - you most likely will some change in those brown areas - some more details becoming visible.

It is most likely that it is required to disassemble the RX520 and inspect the gears for a malfunction for the paper feed mechanism - there are some steps happening after each other - pressing the bottom part of the paper bin forward against the pickup roller, starting the pickup roller, starting the wheels in the printbed to move the paper into print position etc. It could be that something got deadjusted from a previous blockage - you can read out serious errors with the WICReset utility in the status report - if PFxxx errors show up they hint to such blockage.

 

[Ionlab]

Unfortunately no errors at all. Since this printer still works with normal A4 I will just give it back to my dad...I just wanted to check the L800 ink performance and how refillable carts worked, before i commited to the 1500w.

 

[martin0reg]

With different epson printers (r285 r800) I have similar paper feed problems especially with small sizes, but only with very stiff aquarell art paper. The standard cure, cleaning and moistening the main rubber roller to get more grip, could help. But it seems a mechanical problem, some papers are too stiff for some printers. And small sizes may be relatively stiffer than bigger...
All this independently from thickness and weight.

For profiling you need a colormunki photo, no printer profiling with colormunki "display" (=monitor... a profiled monitor is a good thing, but only if you are not satisfied... and it will NOT change your printer output)

 

[Ionlab]

Bad news....I was hoping that the difference between the colormunki versions was in the accompanying software and that the hardware (spectrometer) was the same.

Edit: The cleaning and moistening with alcohol trick seems to have worked...

 

[websnail]

As an aside, has anyone found a good guide for cleaning printer pick-up and paper feed rollers?

 

[Ionlab]

I used a single wet wipe. From the menu selected the nozzle check and pressed the wipe on the rollers as they turned. When the paper empty indicator came on pressed ok and kept wiping for 5minutes...

 

[The Hat]

As an aside, has anyone found a good guide for cleaning printer pick-up and paper feed rollers?

This will do the business, it will make it like new again..