epson L1800 experience ( soundtrack and more)

[te36]

I finally decided to buy a new Epson L1800 because it was selling for 500 Euro. After maybe 10 nozzle clean cycles it went from white printout for the nozzle check to perfect.

What i wonder about now is the soundtrack the printer makes every time the print head passes. It makes some clicking noises at the end. So as if it does all type of head readjustments for every pass maybe ?

There is no such sound from my XP-900 that i bought earlier in the year. Or maybe just a few times for a page.

So i was wondering if anyone here with an L1800 (or maybe L800 ?) can tell me if/what the target soundtrack is.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

You may check for your noise by moving the head manually to the location where it clicks, you power on the printer and pull the power plug as soon as the head moves, so you can move the carriage freely. Could it be that the tubing somewhere touches the case from the inside ? or is there some obstacle in the printpath - like a piece of tape or ???

 

[te36]

Thanks. will take me a bit to get around testing it. (remote from printer now).

 

[te36]

Printer makes a "click" when head moves right into cleaning-pad ? position, and another click somwhere 1/3 across. Reproduceable when moving the head manually. I couldn't quite figure out where it is from though. Nothing was sticking out. Maybe related to the Epson CISS. Likely normal ?

I'll try to listen to more of the L1800 youtube clips trying to hear how it compares. Alas they all seem to be having someone talking the whole time or street noise in the background ;-)

 

[te36]

Some setup experience:

After i first had problems printing borderless with the setup i wanted, i had to set up a VM with VirtualBox and Windows XP because i otherwise do not have any windows where the printer is, just to test borderless with the windows driver. Which was frustrating. The driver only allows to click on "borderless" for a subset of page sizes, and that list of page sizes is not the same as the ones listed in the user manual. It allows to click borderless for 10x15/6x4 but it does not work. It does not allow borderless for A6. In the end i only managed to get borderless for A4. Which was not listed for borderless in the user manual.

The MacOS driver wasn't any better.

Ultimately, i wanted to connect the printer via a print server, so i set up a raspberry PI using instructions on the web. Actually that was extremely simple, just install raspian and cups, configure the printer via the cups web interface (L1800 is supported via the so-called gutenprint driver), done. And my MacOS notebook did immediately find the print server and could install the printer, and it works as i was hoping: computer (Mac) sends postscript to print server, print server renders that to a bitmap (via ghostscript) and then it gets rendered to Epson ESC-P2 and printed. Same should be possible from windows, but one supposedly needs to install Samba on the print server as well, which so far i did not do. Or Airprint to print from iOS/android.

Except that that cups/gutenprint printer driver has over 100 config parameters and it took me a while to even figure out how to best print.

Borderless is a separate option in one sub-menu, and i managed to get borderless A6 to print (yeah). A4 of course too. For borderless, it seems to be necessary to print with resolution >= 1440 or else the picture gets much darker and has a lot of stripes. The epson driver on windows XP axctually warned about this (must use 1440 for borderless), thats how i figured it. And then there is another expand option, and of course the option for 20 paper types and so on.

I also tried turboprint for a short while. Its easily installed as well onto the raspberry. So far, i did not manage to get borderless for A6, but maybe i made a mistake with its parameters.

I still need to figure out how to best color profile with my i1pro and put the profile into the printer server - so i do not need to put color profiles onto every computer i want to print from. That could be easier with turboprint than gutenprint driver. No idea yet.

Right now the printing is very slow, and i see how the raspberry PI 1 model B CPU is always at max during printing, so i have to get a raspberry PI 3 for the job or maybe even some old PC i have left over.

Overall, pretty happy so far. Just takes a lot of time to overcome the lack of good documentation, but thats fine. In the end i will know more about how this stuff works and get what i want. Especially after the Epson Windows XP driver experience trying to limit me to less than what the printer can do.

Oh, best thing about the L1800: No ink stained fingers at all (no offense ;-). Initial loading of the ink was completely without any drips, the ink bottles even came sealed with low pressure so they wouldn't splatter ink when opening the seal (as opposed to some aliexpress ink i had bought in before ;-). By now i have test printed so much that i would have had to go through a couple of cartridge refills.