I am printing business card to Avery 8879 and my printer, Epson R800, kept smearing all over the paper. How do I minimize this problem with this model? Has anyone use this brand and model of printer with success? Your help is appreciated.
You must have a leaking cartridge. Try to identify the color of the smearing part. When Epson printer leaks ink will drop on the paper or drip into printer and mess up big time.
Also be sure, if your printer has the adjustment available, that you adjust it for thick paper or envelopes. That will increase the space under the print head and prevent smearing. My old Epson ESC900 had a lever on the left for this purpose. You might also need to clean the bottom of the print head as it can accumulate ink after a period of time. If you can go onto the comp.periphs.printers newsgroup, look up Arthur Entlich posts and send him an email with a request for his Epson head cleaning manual which he will email to you at no charge. If you can't go onto that newsgroup email me and I'll give you his email address.
Thank you so much for all your responses. I'll give the head cleaning a try but the printer does not have a side lever for adjusting paper thickness...unless it is in a super secret place that I am not aware of. I have had the Epson stylus photo 1270 and with that printer it does have the side lever for adjusting the paper thickness but not this one. As for the cartridge leaking, I don't think that is the case because I've replaced all the ink cartridge and still have the same problem...the problem seems to be coming from the paper thickness plus this particular Avery business card paper since this model does not have a lever to adjust for paper thickness.
if there is a way for you to adjust the speed of printing, make it as slow as possible.
smearing happens when the printhead move back after each pass and if the speed is too fast, and the paper surface too shiny, then the ink will have no time to dry up, thus it smears when the printhead pass over it.