Printing problem with HP B9180

I have a problem that A3+ printing stops at exactly 34cm/13.5 ins every time leaving the rest of the sheet blank. It is

OK on A4, presumably as the length of A4 is less than this distance. Has anyone come across this before and if so

any ideas about the solution please? I am not getting much joy out of HP support in India.

I've had the same thing. Suspect a software defect in the drivers (mine's printing from XP)

 

Never found a fix.

I am using XP Pro and have not had this problem but with my first computer, I didn't have enough horsepower to run all the data in the spool to the printer. It caused the problem you describe.

 

Conni

you might check over on yahoo. sites for this printer.

I have the simmilar problems with a HP Pro B8330. If it print bodlerless it tends to crop the image to cover the whole page - not what I want when printing panoramas. If I don't use the borderless option it does what you describe. I think the HP software is to blame. It is so clunky and tries too hard to idiot proof things by making decisions for you, except the software seems to have been designed by an idiot in the first place.

Ps if you find a solution I would be very grateful to hear it.

What does HP support say about this?

Thanks for the responses. HP support keep sending me standard responses from their knowledge base that don't help at all, such as telling me how to select the A3+ paper size or suggesting it is a mechanical failure. There doesn't seem to be anyone there who actually understands the problem, they are just using faint clues to find something in the knowledge base. They have suggested that there is a compatibility issue with CS2, but no details and I think this is probably a shot in the dark as well.

Are you printing from Photoshop? It is possibly an incompatibility between it and the printer drivers. One trick might be to do your editing in photoshop but print from a different program. I used to use PSE 2 for my editing but print from ACD See 6 as I found my old printer less temperamental this way.

 

You might have to let the printer manage colours rather than photoshop.

 

On the whole I think I am over HP printers. Both that I have owned had had terrible software that makes trying to get what you want a crap shoot. I regularly use the print preview function, which shows the picture centered and filling the page only for a print to come out uncentered, with an inch wide margin on one side. When you adjust a margin the software adjusts it back to a default, even though the printer is supposed to support borderless printing.

I am using and printing from CS2 on XP Pro so that can't be the problem.

 

I still think you need to check the amount of memory available. A CS file can get to be really huge if you've done a lot of work on it and it won't leave enough memory for it to spool completely to your printer.

 

I have 5 HP printers, the oldest is the 7960 I use for B&W. Four of the five are Photosmarts. I haven't had problems with any of them. They all run on XP Pro. Three are on CS2 and Two are on CS but it hasn't made a difference with any of them.

 

It is aggravating when IT doesn't work because we're so used to it being a wonderful solution to so much we do. Getting answers from any tech rep is a crap shoot. I ended up having to get a gmail account to get mail from PN after years of no problems with global.net. Their tech rep entered my account and attempted to fix it and couldn't.

 

If none of the things suggested here work, go to that good ol' well, the Web. It takes some mining but sometimes the answers are there in some level of obscurity.

 

Conni

I investigated my problems last night through trial and error, wasting close to a full set of cartriges in the process, and worked out some workarounds that may or may not be of help to you.

 

The photosmart software does not seem to retain any setting you put in it after you go through the page setup routine and return to your application. It often seems to return to defaults, which have a "letter" paper size. You need to set these after you have pressed print in photoshop.

 

Use photoshop to scale the image to paper size.

 

In photoshop when you go to print and the windows printer window pops up go to printer properties and then set up your paper size, print quality, colour management setting etc. Use print at actual size. Photoshop should have already done the rescaling. In the advanced settings turn minimize margins to on.

 

Make sure the paper is loaded into the printer in portrait orientatation. If printing photos in landscape make sure in the printer preference window you have landscape checked.

 

If using boderless printing be aware if your aspect ratio is different to the paper size that the image will be resized to cover the whole page by cropping around the edges - not what you want if you actually want to print at a different aspect ratio.

 

A workaround that I have found useful to avoid the photosmart making (wrong) decisions for you is to create your own custom paper size. When choosing paper size, choose custom and enter you own A3 paper size. Call it Andrew's Custom A3 or something, neter in the other available papremters and save it. This won't allow you to print borderless but the minimize margins feature will kepp the margins down to a few millimetres.

 

The memory suggestion Constance raised is a good one. I have experienced your problem from time to time and thinking about it now it may have been when I was running several applications.

What you are suggesting Geoff seems on the right lines and I will try them, thanks. The original problem I had in

PS CS2 was that it would not print at all as the printer kept claiming the paper size was wrong. I gave up trying to

print from PS months ago as it worked OK from Lightroom. The problem is now that Lightroom is creating the

different problem of not printing all of the sheet. However, the common thread sems to be the printer and

software getting completely confused about paper size. The only thing is that the 13.5" it is printing on A3+ does

not seem to relate to any actual paper size. If it was 13" one could assume it was A3+ with the wrong orientation.

The exactitude with which it stops printing on the sheet suggests to me something wrong with the parameters

rather than memory as it has been exactly the same 3 times in a row, and it has worked before. Cursing HP at

this point is not going to help, but they seem to have created something with far too many variables. The they

cannot contend with interactions to variations in the editing software, the operating system and plugins.

Geoff:

 

What you described above is exactly how I do printing on all my HP printers. That's how I figured out how to do it. If you don't know anything (I didn't), you follow what seems logical so that's what I worked out. But I did find that as my prints and printers got bigger, I needed a lot more memory for spooling or I got the 'cutoff' problem as originally described. That problem was easily fixed by adding more memory to the computers I already had and buying big in memory on my new machines. I have had no more problems.

 

After I read what you wrote (above) I realized that I just assumed that this was what everyone did and so didn't mention it. After you resize in PS, the HP software works just the way it should. It does default back but I think that's because someone for sure would forget to set a size or orientation and get something they don't want so the software makes us think about what we're doing. If you print one-after-another, it stays fixed.

 

Good work.

Conni

I am running Vista with 2GB of memory. With Lightroom running there is 0.8 GB free so I would hope that is enough?

Andrew:

 

That's not enough.

Conni

Sorry for the delay in replying but I have been away and it took a long time to fix. I got an extra 2Gb bringing it to 4GB and it now works OK on Photoshop, although not Lightroom for big prints. Thanks for your help on this. The 2Gb I had was 8 times the min spec of 256K so I am not too chuffed with HP, so it needs 16 times this to work.