Thursday, December 04, 2014

Problems: Blogger, and Printer

Blogger is acting up. Picture files take about 4-5 times as long as normal to upload, and come in heavily distorted. At least a stop too dark with livid color saturation. It's a little like when the Google+ connection began to automatically "enhance" the pictures. I checked that the two switches over there are properly turned off, but the upload problem persists. I won't bother posting again until pictures upload correctly.

Meanwhile, after nearly three years of unusually reliable service, my Epson 3880 has developed the usual plague of nozzle clogging.

6 comments:

John said...

Maybe with that new steam heat, conditions are too dry? try cleaning the wiper blade, if you can figure out how to find it.

James Weekes said...

I just loaded a picture and got the same vivid result, rats.

I have a 3800 and it's glossy black head has been hopelessly clogged for over a year. Luckily I prefer matte and have a large supply of different papers. When they go I will probably upgrade to the 3880 or it's successor.

Carl Weese said...

Have you run a simple nozzle check from the panel? Thing is, one of the problems of this machine is that MK and PK inks have to share the same nozzle. If there were separate nozzles, as with higher spec machines, you wouldn't have to do a crossover. So I'm curious how you can have no PK but good MK, unless the crossover itself inadvertently cleared a clog. Really, do a simple nozzle check in your matte configuration and see if you have a proper set of patterns.

Carl Weese said...

John,

I've gotten the printer out of the issue, with timed clean/soak iterations. Finding the blade of this "little" printer would be interesting—Chinese curse—but not needed now.

Conditions are indeed dry, but less so than before the new and efficient boiler. The house is in better balance, and the humidity problem is less than you'd have with a blown hot air furnace. My giant humidifier in the adjacent room goes through at least four gallons a day, even though it's steam heat. Makes the humidity close to 40% instead of Santa Fe.

James Weekes said...

That is the strange thing. If I run a nozzle check and cleaning I get perfect patterns across the board, with MK. If I switch to PK I get either nothing in the PK pattern or a big blot of ink. So I assume that it must be somewhere between the PK cartridge and the head. I haven't pursued it too hard because I am very happy with the matte printing.

I just ran a test and the MK printed a perfect pattern. I am loathe to switch as it wastes so much ink and it would be the fourth time I have tried with no change.

Carl Weese said...

Very strange, I have no idea what would cause that behavior. Certainly, if you're happy with your matte paper results just leave it alone rather than waste ink chasing the problem.

On the other front, Safari now can't get here, to comments, although there was no problem yesterday...