After getting 4 prints out, and finally determining that 36 minutes per print is remarkably slow, it now turns out that there’s a part broken in the printer that ends up dragging and scratcing prints. Somehow I’ve been fortunate enough to only have it ruin one so far, but now I’m basically paranoid to put paper in it, for fear that it will scratch more, and of course each scratched print is not only a piece of paper wasted, but at least 15 minutes because I can’t even see that its scratching until it’s printed a certain amount. I thought, at first, that maybe the tractors had just come loose, but on closer inspection, the pin that’s supposed to hold the tractors in place has busted off and one tractor is hanging lower than the rest. If I could find some way to move or raise that tractor, I could at least go back to printing, but I’m afraid anything I do as a temporary fix may cause longer, lingering damage. If it were my printer, I’d be game for it, but unfortunately, the school is not so amenable to me McGuyver-ing their hardware. I kind of think Jason would be a bit put off as well. I’ll just have to tell him about it on Monday. Maybe I’ll just get way behind on printing, but have all of tomorrow off. Wouldn’t that be nice? Then I could play some WoW.

I wonder how much a 2200 of my own would cost.

Update, I did a couple small tests, ran some scraps through and the scratching seems to have subsided for the time being. My current plan is to print until either A) I can’t stand being up here anymore or B) another sheet of paper gets wasted. I’d love to get 10 prints done today, hell, I’d love to get 20 prints done today, but at this rate, it ain’t gonna happen. Lessee, it’s just after 6 now, to get all 20 prints done with no errors would be 2am at the earliest. Yeah, not happening I bet.

Oh, and a 2200 still runs around $3-500. A 2400, which is the new 8 color equivalent, runs about $900.

so, yeah, these photos take 36 minutes a piece to print out. I doubt I’ll get all 20 done today.

Color Matching sucks.

Somehow I got all my colors to look great at home off my cheapo Epson R300M, but up here on this phatt 2200, I’m getting GREEN. Maybe it’s got school spirit or something, but I’ve been reduced to doing a ton of test strips. I hope I don’t run out of 8.5×11 paper doing color tests. Also, my contrast is way out of balance as well. When I was doing them at home the darks were dark, but the mediums were nice and visible. Now the mediums are as dark as the darks and details are disappearing. It is my first time printing from this printer, so I should expect a little variance I guess. It just didn’t take nearly this long at home. Thankfully there’s no one standing behind me waiting to use the printer, I have the place pretty much to my self. Two of the other students are here doing other projects, so I pretty much have the room to myself. I would just like to find the magic combination of color settings so that the images look right. Once that happens, I can just go to mass printing them. I just need the image on screen and the printed image to match. Once that happens, I’m golden because I already balanced most of my images last night.

Wish me luck.

Edit: Whilst I was writing this, I finally came across the correct recipe. Now to determine if there is a perceptive difference between a true 192 DPI and an interpolated 350 DPI.

and just for my own edification, the final recipe was Photoshop Decided: SP2200 SemiGloss 2880, Perceptive Color, Black Point Compensation, ICM, No Adjust