Printing fine art papers
This post will be of interest to very few, but it has some good tips for those experiencing problems so I’m posting it anyway. If you don’t print fine art papers then skip it – you’ll be bored to death.
I have been using a beautiful paper made by German company Hahnemuhle. It’s an archival grade matte paper called ‘Photo Rag’, quite heavy at 308 gsm. The prints I get are fantastic. The trouble is, my Epson R800 was not designed for such heavy papers. It does not have a ‘straight-through’ option for the paper path so they don’t feed well at all. Even when I can get them to feed, after a few copies are printed the paper starts to slip on the rollers causing loss of register, jams or simply refuses to feed.
However, I found a couple of really good tips on the web that have solved my problems completely.
Printer woes
One of the casualties of our move back to Nelson last year turns out to have been my printer! I use an Epson R800 for high quality printing in colour (not B&W though). Epson printers like this one have the actual printhead in the printer itself, rather than (as in many HP printers) in the cartridge. If the printer is not used regularly the ink can dry out and cause blockages. The result is banding, or in more severe cases a huge shift in colour balance as one of the 5 colours disappears.