[Jeremy Roussak]

Epson Printers

on: December 26, 2020 at 10:31 am

I’m finding that my 7500 sometimes crops off the bottom of my prints. It doesn’t just stop, and I get no “filter failed” errors: it just decides that the print should be cropped.

I’ve just printed an image which should have been 33cm wide by 69cm high, centred on a 61cm (24″) roll. The setup in LR has page size 70cm high, 5mm borders all round, with cell size 33cm wide and 69cm high. The print job runs but the resulting print is only 54cm high; then there’s a 15mm margin (which is what I’d expect after a successful print) and the paper is cut. Increasing the paper height in the page setup dialog makes no difference.

I’ve had it before, with a 59cm square print: that was cut off in the same way, at 46cm.

There seems no rhyme nor reason to it: at other times, I’ve printed 59cm square with no problem.

Any ideas? I’m stumped.

Jeremy

• This topic was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by Jeremy Roussak.
• This topic was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by Jeremy Roussak.

[Jeremy Roussak Gold Member Posts: 1047]

Re: SC-P7500 weirdness

Reply #1 on: December 26, 2020 at 10:34 am

PS: I’m running on a Mac under Catalina, with the latest version of LR. I’ve tried de-installing and re-installing the Epson driver: the one I have now was released on the Epson UK site in November. I have also installed the latest firmware update for the printer.

Jeremy

[Mark D Segal Silver Member Posts: 951]

Re: SC-P7500 weirdness

Reply #2 on: December 26, 2020 at 11:58 am

I’ve been discovering very recently that the Epson driver, depending on printer model and driver version, can have an issue with correctly sized and positioned reproduction of photos on roll paper. I have notified Epson of this in the couple of specific instances I have encountered and I assume their engineers are looking into it. But it’s of course not clear whether the problem is with Lightroom or the printer driver, or how the two relate to each other. That said, I’d suggest one thing that may seem counter-intuitive but it may work – you’ll let us know. In the Page Set-Up in the driver, select “borderless” (but not auto-expand), and make sure the height you set is a bit more than sufficient to accommodate both the image height and the size of the margin you want above and below the photo (which if a landscape image would be to the left and right, although in driver-ese this would top and bottom). So in your case, if you want a 5mm margin on top and bottom of a 690mm high print, you would set the height of the cut-off to at least 690+10 = 700. I’d give it a bit more for comfort, although the roll spews out a bit more than needed before cutting anyhow. See what happens when you print it. Use the cheapest paper on hand, this is an experiment not guaranteed to work.

[Jeremy Roussak Gold Member Posts: 1047]

Re: SC-P7500 weirdness

Reply #3 on: December 26, 2020 at 1:05 pm

Mark, I’m using a custom page size 605mm wide by 700mm high, with “non-printable area” of zero all round: see screenshot.

I think I didn’t express myself properly: the cut-off is at the end of the print, so the “bottom” as it comes out of the printer but the left-hand side of the image as viewed. In other words, it prints an image 33cm wide (left-to-right on the paper; top-to-bottom of the image) but only 54cm long (top-to-bottom on the paper, left-to right on the print), cutting off the last 15cm of the image as it comes out of the printer.

I’ve just tried using LR to “print” it to a jpeg, then printed the jpeg using Epson print layout. That has worked well (except that the image is only 32cm wide, but I suspect that’s my fault: I’m not used to the Epson software), so it’s hard to know if it’s the driver, LR or some combination.

It’s enough to make me think of buying ImagePrint (which Kevin raves about, but which is far from cheap).

Jeremy

[Mark D Segal Silver Member Posts: 951]

Re: SC-P7500 weirdness

Reply #4 on: December 26, 2020 at 1:13 pm

If the photo is printing at half the width on roll paper, that may also be a driver issue.

I recommend that you discuss all this thoroughly with Epson ProGraphics Support before even contemplating an expensive work-around like ImagePrint. There’s no reason in principle why you should need to spend a lot of extra money to do what Lightroom and the Epson driver are supposed to do.

[Jeremy Roussak Gold Member Posts: 1047]

Re: SC-P7500 weirdness

Reply #5 on: December 26, 2020 at 2:17 pm

You’re absolutely right, of course. I’ve requested tech support by email.

The width is intentional: I want an image 33cm x 69cm. It’s just too big to print in landscape.

I’ve tried again using Epson print layout to print the jpeg “printed” to file by LR, and now have a perfect result (in terms of size). It’s clearly not how things should work, however.

Jeremy

[Mark D Segal Silver Member Posts: 951]

Re: SC-P7500 weirdness

Reply #6 on: December 26, 2020 at 2:38 pm

Yup – I understand exactly what you are trying to do; perfectly reasonable – as well as the fact that it should just work! 🙂 And I agree, that business of converting to JPEG and using another application to print from is again a kludge that shouldn’t be necessary; it also destroys a lot of data. Will be interesting to learn what Epson comes back with when they reply to you.

[John Hollenberg Participant Posts: 64]

Re: SC-P7500 weirdness

Reply #7 on: December 26, 2020 at 8:54 pm

This may be a silly question, but why do these problems with the latest Epson large format printers still exist one year after they were released?  It doesn’t give one much confidence in their product.

[Mark D Segal Silver Member Posts: 951]

Re: SC-P7500 weirdness

Reply #8 on: December 26, 2020 at 9:22 pm

Actually John, I think the question may be less silly than premature, because the print path is complex (Application-OSX/CUPS-Printer Driver/Firmware and we don’t know where the true error is occurring causing the results that Jeremy reports. It’s the same kind of concern about the “Filter Failed” issue that has been with us for years and spans numerous printer brands. Any time one item in the chain gets “updated”, unintended side effects or knock-on effects could occur that only get discovered by users doing particular things with their printers that cause them to manifest themselves. I was printing for about 4 years on the Epson SC-P5000 with no issues, then all of the sudden I ran into this extraordinarily stubborn “Filter Failed” issue. Epson and Apple are both working on it and they have no definitive answers yet. This stuff is complicated, but in the fullness of time most of the issues do get resolved.

[Jeremy Roussak Gold Member Posts: 1047]

Re: SC-P7500 weirdness

Reply #9 on: December 27, 2020 at 9:52 am

I have a nagging feeling that this problem arose after I’d installed the latest firmware update, but I might be wrong.

Anyway, I thought I’d try Qimage One, in case it could do a better job. I’m having difficulties with it too: when I try to send a photo to Q1 from Lightroom, I get an error:

[string “Q1ExportMenuItem.lua”]:1: attempt to perform arithmetic on local ‘i’ (a nil value)

Anyone have any ideas?

Jeremy

[Mark D Segal Silver Member Posts: 951]

Re: SC-P7500 weirdness

Reply #10 on: December 27, 2020 at 11:57 am

Your “feeling” I expect stems from the rational approach to look for what changed in the operating environment immediately before performance degraded, so a firmware upgrade could be an important clue into resolution of the problem.  Not being a QImage user I have no insight into that error, but I recall (unless it has changed) that QImage relies on the Epson driver, so in case the problem were driver-related QImage would not necessarily resolve it. If the problem were Firmware-related, QImage would not resolve it. I didn’t see anything in the settings you made pointing to “pilot error”, so I would still wait for the advice to come back from Epson. Again, print preparation follows a complex path involving three major applications; when errors occur, unless there were a single source that becomes obvious through diagnosis of log files, I expect one may also need to look for knock-on effects between them.

Have you tried the “Epson enema” yet? (It’s essentially deleting everything Epson from your computer and starting over with fresh downloads and installs of the whole works.) This could be useful if the cause were some non-diagnosed file corruption.

[Eric Brody Participant Posts: 69]

Re: SC-P7500 weirdness

Reply #11 on: December 27, 2020 at 1:19 pm

I’ve been reading about this printer since it came out. There are very few reviews, most are not helpful at all. I’ve fantasized about a 24″ printer for a couple of years but end up talking myself out of it each time. Posts such as this one don’t do much for my confidence. Perhaps it’s a situation similar to “high end” appliances; the company makes so few that the inevitable problems don’t get worked out in production but end up making the owners into beta testers for the manufacturer. Thanks to Jeremy for your reporting of these issues and of course to Mark for his expert advice. I tend to prefer two print sizes, small, eg 5×7 and “as large as I can make it,” which for me, currently is a 17×22 piece of paper. First world problem…

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