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.

First print from Epson compatible ink

Well, I used the new Epson Stylus 1280 compatible ink I purchased from http://www.123inkcartridges.ca/ with Epson premium glossy paper. I ran the nozzle head cleaning utility once. I could see it was clogged up prior to the cleaning. After cleaning, the light blue head was still not fully clean--all the colours came out fine except for the light blue. I decided to go ahead with a print job of a flower I took in 2007 with my D80 anyway.

The colour rendition is superb with the compatible ink. All the colours came through vibrant and sharp. The glossy paper makes for a nice photo quality touch. From a couple of feet away, the photo looks flawless. The only problem, if I were to pixel-peep from a foot away, is that I can see is the banding (and remember this is on premium glossy paper) and some black streaks. I have a feeling that the banding is caused by the black ink print head or the dpi resolution (currently set at 720dpi).

First prints from the Epson Stylus 1280

I finally printed my first five photos on this Epson Stylus 1280 using the original Epson ink cartridges. The first two photos were printed on Epson glossy 4"x6" photo paper. I was expecting a perfect print. The colours came out superb but the photos were far from perfect. I could clearly see colour banding (I think I see blue banding more than any other colour) and the print head skipped one line of pixels too. Maybe the print nozzles are slightly clogged up? In any case, I thought I'd see those bands only on plain paper. I thought glossy photo paper would fix that problem, but it does not appear to.

I then tried Epson matte 8.5"x11" paper. Same thing. Bands of colours are obvious. Maybe it's because I did not choose the right settings when printing?

For the glossy paper, I chose glossy photo paper type and even chose quality printing vs. high speed printing. (I also selected to borderless printing which worked great by the way.)

For the matte paper, I chose the heavyweight matte paper type but here I chose high speed printing.

For what I use these photos for though, I'm ok with the quality. If the photos are for a wedding, well, that's another story.