Help with Epson P400, NO RIP :)

[Raw Paw]

Hello brothers and sisters of the print realm,

Our Epson 1430 just doodied the bed and we purchase an Epson P400. When buying the 1430, I did some research on the board as to workarounds for the Accurip software. The work around - instead of printing the output as solid black, we have been printing films that look Dark Green on the computer (but print black, since the printer is loaded with all black cartridges). The dark green color pulled a more even amount of ink from each printer cartridge, rather than an uneven amount from each cartridge. The Green in question: CMYK - C100 M 70 Y 100 K 10

Have any of you brave souls found a similar workaround for the P400? This is kinda important for me to figure out as the P400 takes 8 ink cartridges, instead of 6... might just need to buy the software..... But trying to avoid that. I get great results printing without the Rip, and can't really justify spending the money if it won't make a difference in my sep quality. Thanks!

[Raw Paw]

Hello again, brothers and sisters of the print realm. I am experiencing a strange problem with the P400... I am using the same print settings as with the 1430, except, under "Print Settings -> Printer Settings" I have unchecked "Gloss Optimizer." The problem is, my old files I printed through the 1430 seem to inexplicably print transparent black covering the whole transparency when printed through the P400, with the actual printed image printing solid black (picture attached).

A bit more information and data - right out of the box, every separation was printing this way, until I unchecked the "Gloss Optimizer" option. Now the issue of the separation being printed completely black seems to be happening on my old files, and some new files, depending on the artwork. So far, here are my two solutions (which I hope I don't have to resort to on a near daily basis which will waste tons of film and ink)

-For old artwork printed through the 1430, I just select every layer in the file, and duplicate them to a new document, and print. This seems to work in a majority of cases

-I just now couldn't get that to work, so I redid the separation, and that was giving me the same problem. So I opened up a separation file I actually got to print out on the p400 today, and duplicated the problem layer into said file. Problem solved. Doesn't make any sense though.

Also - I printed a good number of separations today, somewhere around 20, and here are my remaining ink levels (picture attached). It seems like using the dark green referred to in my original post isn't a good route, because there is only one Cyan cartridge, instead of two. The cartridges on the P400 are Yellow, Magenta, Red, Orange, Cyan, Matte Black, Photo Black, and Gloss Optimizer. Since there are so many warm colored cartridges, it seems logical that the workaround output color would be a dark red orange on the computer, which would draw a more equal amount of ink through each cartridge, and not drain the cyan so quickly. For reference, the cartridges on the 1430 were Cyan, Light Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, Light Magenta, and Black. With this configuration, it makes sense that the output color would be dark green on the computer.

May your prints be full of power, glory and majesty.

[Raw Paw]

Today I printed all the my seps a dark amber color, C-40 M-100 Y-80 K-60, and it seemed to draw from all of the cartridges much more evenly.  Still haven't found a solution to the film printing all black, and just using my weird workaround where I duplicate the layers that need printing into a new document, or a document I have already successfully printed, then deleting the other layers and saving as a new file.  Will keep experimenting.

[Sbrem]

We don't print with multiple cartridges, just the Photo Black on our T3270. The multiple cartridges printing the same image isn't as clean, in my opinion, as a single cart. Also, the film doesn't have to totally opaque, mine certainly aren't and expose fine. They just need to filter out the part of the spectrum that hardens your emulsion. We do have AccuRIP, but before we did, we could still print out seps. For instance, in Illustrator, as long as all of your assigned colors are "spot" colors as opposed to a CMYK mix, they would print out solid black separations (again, not absolutely opaque). Buy the RIP and stop wasting time you could be printing and making money which in turn will pay off the cost in a very short time.

Steve