Good prints from the Epson Stylus 1280

The colour banding was starting to eat away my mind.  I kept on thinking about it the whole week.  How could this printer produce such low quality photos when some cheap commodity inkjets can print photos without banding?  I decided to do one more print, onto glossy paper.  This time, I looked closely at the colour bands and noticed it was really just the blueish parts of the photo that suffers from colour banding.  The green was completely fine and so was black.  Also, the blue colour banding seems to be a result of some missing pixels, so it appears like bands.

I had to run through the nozzle check utility to see a pixel is missing from the blue ink. Sure enough in the blue/pink ink, there were a couple of lines missing from the nozzle test.  A good nozzle test should look like the following:

I decided then to waste some ink and run the nozzle cleaning utility.  I had to do this twice to get a perfect nozzle test.  Once the nozzle test shows a perfect print, I then retried some more photo prints on glossy paper.

In the printer printing preference menu, I selected to print on Glossy Photo Paper and chose a custom DPI of 1440.  I am not sure if 720dpi would have been fine but so far, the prints came out nearly perfect.  It was nearly perfect because close to the two shorter edges, there were a streak mark.  I'm not sure where that comes from yet but I have seen it in every print I have made so far--I guess something is dirty.  However, at least, there is no more banding!  Woohoo!

I am now printing onto the 11"x17" glossy paper--the primary reason I bought this printer, for $90 by the way--of a beach scene I took in Costa Rica a couple of years ago.  The print is coming out fine.

For my own information, before I print next time, I should always run through the nozzle check first.  The nozzle check does not waste ink. It prints just a few lines using all the print heads for inspection.