Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

Hello,

I am new to Qimage Ultimate and have encountered an unexpected issue when printing a black and white image.

My printer is an Epson scp900.

The image was processed as black and white.

I set the printer/paper configuration then selected the paper manufacturer's icc profile.
In the print drive setting I modified the option and selected the "Advanced black and white" setting.
When I printed the image, everything worked as it normally does and the printer started "printing" with the print head moving normally and all the usual printer sounds over the next couple of minutes.
The ejected piece of paper was totally blank, not one drop of ink.

When I switched the driver setting back to colour and tried again, the black and white print was completed as expected.

Please can I have advice as to why this might have happened and how I can utilised the "Advanced b&w" print driver setting while using Qimage.

Thank you,

Chris

Did the printer sound like the head was moving and the paper advanced slowly like it normally would?  Or did it just spit the page out.  If the former, your black ink channel is likely clogged or not working.  You can also turn on print preview in the driver so the driver shows you a preview of what it should look like before it actually prints.  If that preview shows the B/W image but nothing prints, it's a hardware problem like ink channel not working.

Regards,
Mike

It did sound like it was printing and advanced the paper slowly but nothing printed despite the nozzle check being normal

I should add as well, that when I changed the printer driver to colour, a perfect B&W print was produced. Just seemed strange that the driver had to be set to colour to get a B&W print when it took 7 minutes to print a blank page moments earlier

Report back regarding what you see on the print preview.  And double check that nozzle check pattern: I could retire from Qimage if I had a nickel for every time a customer said the nozzle check was fine... and it ended up that one channel was completely missing.  When one is missing, nothing prints in that spot so it's not obvious like it would be if just some of the nozzles were misfiring.

Mike

Nozzle check patterns are all accounted for, all 10 of them.

Print preview shows as well.

I don't get it.

Thank you for your help and engagement. Sorry about the lack of nickel on this occasion.

If the print preview looks good, there's a dislink between the driver and the printer.  The driver displays what it is about to send to the printer and then the printer doesn't render that: that's outside the scope of Qimage when the printer doesn't print what the driver is sending to it.

Just in case, you could try holding the Shift key while you click on the "Properties" button to open the driver (this forces Qimage to forget any prior/saved driver settings).  Then in the driver, set your BW mode and all other settings manually.  Then try to print after that.

Mike

I will let you know how I get on.

Thanks again :)