The more you know... #facePalm

[websnail]

R2880 printer, all nozzles firing, works fine... trying it out with some new inks but we were seeing this sort of "bunching up" in the vertical.

Eh? thinks I, so we figure it's a problem with the paper feed tracking, probably dirt on the disk... Take the side off, nothing we can see... Weird.

Spend half an hour looking at the damn thing and trying to figure out what it could be... Paper sensor, broken cogs, slipping drive band...


... then a little light bulb goes off...

... Manic laughter begins.

We'd completely forgotten about the alignment function in the maintenance tools for the printer.

You may now laugh...

 

[stratman]

Can you post an image of the "bunching up in the verticle"? Happy to hear you fixed the issue easily.

 

[websnail]

Can you post an image of the "bunching up in the verticle"? Happy to hear you fixed the issue easily.

I've done what I can with the lack of a scanner in the workshop at the moment but the attached image has been tweaked to try and show the issue.The Cyan demonstrates the issue best but you've got to look at the image with your peripheral vision to see the difference properly.

Basically it's a regular pattern of light horizontal "bands" instead of uniform colour. Once the alignment function was run the banding disappeared and we were up and running.

Definitely one of those, "when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" type moments

 

[Shankar]

Man, you've got to really look for them bands!
I wonder how this would affect printing of a photo....

 

[websnail]

Man, you've got to really look for them bands!
I wonder how this would affect printing of a photo....

Those bands are very obvious when viewed naturally but the camera I had access to just doesn't provide the contrast so it's difficult to get a decent representation of the output.

Either way we all learn something new... well... old... again?

 

[Smile]

Seems like every EPSON has this banding problem, alignment fixes it for some time. This is more seen on L series printers like L800 etc. Why the other printers like Brother who use piezo type head too does not have any such problems?