Epson L1800 magenta dust beside black at right area of A3 paper

[anazoolik]

Hi,

i have a problem with my L1800 (printed 3000 sheets A3).

If i print black elements with yellow background at A3-sheets, the printer produces in the right area of the sheets a magenta dust directly beside the black elements. But only in the right area. It starts (not noticable) in the middle and at the right it will be visible also without glasses.

Cleaning reduces this effect a little bit, but not for a long time and not complete. I also cleaned the timing encoder stripe without success for this problem.

With black at white background i can't recognize this magenta dust...

Has anybody an idea, what could cause such a behaviour?

Thanks!
Holger

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I don't see the effect you describe - is that image a scan of a printout with that magenta contamination ? Could you mark it where it is ?

 

[anazoolik]

Thanks for reply. It is a scan.
Attached a clipped part of the right side of the sheet

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

What is the original file you are printing ? With which software ?

You have a missing nozzle or need to do a printhead alignment

I'm doing an extract of the magenta channel of your image

Yes, it shows some small amount of 'magenta dust' there, but all this is pretty difficult since there is an overlay of jpg compression artifacts hiding the important details.

Please rather use the .png format which does some lossless compression as well but the most variations I see are compression artifacts.

 

[anazoolik]

The original is a JPG, printed with Illustrator. But the JPG is not the problem, i print some copies on one sheet and only the right area has this magenta dust.
Attached a png.

 

[The Hat]

Has anybody an idea, what could cause such a behaviour?

The issue is in the mixture of the yellow and magenta..
Have you tried increasing the platen gap to see if that will help..

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

The original is a JPG, printed with Illustrator

are you generating/editing the original file in Illustrator ? Please do not save it as .jpg but tiff or png and crop it to the area of concern as above; please try to get .jpg completely out of the editing/saving process; jpg is creating lots of additional colors during (de)compression, and there is a kind of error propagation happening as well lots of pixels away. Adn there is a directional effect, the compression algorithm starts at the top left corner scanning through the pixels, grouping and averaging them. And please disable any color/image enhancement settings in the driver as well like coloroptimization/photo enhancement or similar.

Go to the 'more Options' tab, change Color correction to 'custom' , select Color Controls, not Photo Enhance
and do a reprint with a non-jpegd data file.

Have you tried increasing the platen gap to see if that will help..

Go to the maintenance tab in the driver - extended settings - activate 'Thick paper and Envelopes'.

 

[anazoolik]

The platen gap could be the reason. I checked "heavy paper" and the printer produce massive magenta dust at the left side of black elements on the whole sheet.
Is there a possibility to fine tune the platen gap?

 

[anazoolik]

We use jgp, because normally we get photos from our customers. And only with less compression (in Photoshop quality 12)
We also used in history a Canon, some Epson 1500W and a Pro 4900. We had never this problem. Only with the L1800. So i can exclude JPG as source for the trouble.
The artefacts in first images came from scanning and saving with more compression to reduce the file size for this forum
We print without enhancing, we print with own profiles.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Let's try this - I have an L1800 printer as well; you give me the file as you are printing it - or cropped to the section with the problem - saved in .png, you please let me know driver parameters - paper, quality , printed size and I'll try replicate the problem - or not - I don't know, it we can get somewhere.

Which impact does the magenta shade really have - it is barely visible - who - what is affected by that magenta ?