EPSON 1280 not printing the whole image despite correct preview

[marshall]

Sorry to bug the forum with what ought to be a Help question, but I

haven't heard back from Epson and I'm hoping someone here can shed

some light on this problem.

 

My 1280 isn't printing the whole image. With an 8x10ish image on an

8.5x11 sheet, it quits about 2.5" from the right edge. In other

words, it prints most of the image and then feeds the paper out

without finishing. For some reason, it worked a couple times when I

set it to "Maximum Printable Area" in the print driver. However, I

can't seem to get it to finish the 13x19 that I just tried to print

(twice). [image size is 12.5x16.9.] The Epson Print Preview shows

the entire image correctly, so it seems to happen after Photoshop

does its thing. I have even replaced the printer driver with the

most up-to-date one. I have only 512Mb of RAM, but even so, it

hasn't had this problem before.

 

Again, sorry to bug the list with what is essentially a help

question, but I'm going a bit crazy here. Any suggestions? Thanks!

[mark_herring]

Hard to help without being on the scene to try things. First, make sure you dont have something like roll paper set, or landscape vs portrait.

 

Print a text file or a web page--does it still cut off?

 

Try different paper sizes and image sizes to see if some pattern emerges

[Marvin]

It happened to me a few days ago. I couldn't figure out what I had done wrong so I shut everything down and booted up again - the problem was gone.

[Ed_Ingold]

The spooler may be corrupted, or out of disk space. You don't say what operating system you have, but the general principals are the same for Microsoft products. My specific reference is Win2K.

 

In the control panel, in the Printers applet, select File/Server Properties/Advanced and select the spooling directory. Make sure the disk has ample free space (at least 500M), and has been defragmented. You need to specify a directory other than the root directory.

 

Injet printing runs more smoothly if you instruct the print driver (properties/advanced) to "start printing after the last page is spooled."

 

If you want to print multiple copies, select "Keep printed documents" and restart the spooler as needed. If you select multiple pages in the driver, the spooler often fills up and overloads. Laser printer store the document in internal buffers, and are much easier to manage.

[marshall]

Hm. Not sure why, after everything else I tried, I didn't reset the printer. Now, having done that, I have the Maintenance Light on, too, but I'm going to test the thing out and report back...

[marshall]

Interesting. I suspect it isn't quite right that in the spool folder, one of the items, FP00001.spl, claims to be a "Shockwave Flash Object", but otherwise everything in the Spool folder seems right.

 

All that said, after resetting the printer, but not yet changing anything else (landscape/portrait, roll, etc., have been double checked and were correct in previous attempts), I now can't recreate this problem that had occurred so consistently over the last week.

So, feeling a little sheepish, I offer my humble thanks to everyone, and I'll report back in this thread if anything I do recreates it. [i'll check in anyway in case there are other causes for me to root out.] Thanks!

[beepy]

Did you reboot the machine?

<p>

I had this problem once with 1280 when I was running out of disk space where the

spool area was (c: drive on Windows). I'm thinking rebooting might free up some

space as temp files may be removed? Not particularly a Windows person though...

[steven_clark]

Does it stop with or without completing the pattern on what it does print. On some rare occasions I have seen a problem where a particular print will somehow randomly come up with a sequence of data that causes the rpinter to stop what it's doing partway through the print and immediately feed to the next page before continuing. In this particulat case manipulating the image ever so slightly to change the bits seemed to fix the problem. Think of it as the computer science problem of being attacked by a thousand monkies with typewriters.

[jason_myers]

I had this problem several times and wasted a lot of expensive 13x19 Colorlife paper. At least in my case, it turned out to be the Temp files. Not sure if I'm using the right terminology, but it seems that when you've printed a number of large files, the buffer fills the Temp file but doesn't empty it of the files you're done with and have closed. Emptying the Temp files definitely solved the problem for me.

 

Jason

[marshall]

Some interesting thoughts, and thanks to everyone for them. After powering down and restarting the printer last night, the problem hasn't recurred for a few prints (why it didn't occur to me to reboot the thing in the first place, I don't know; I don't park it very often, I guess).

 

Jason - Are you referring to printer temp files, or photoshop temp files?

 

Brian - Rebooting the PC hadn't solved the problem previously (even with reinstalling the printer drivers, and the spool folder looks ok (the system drive has free space on it).

 

Steven - It wasn't completing the print. Just fed out the rest of the sheet and didn't ask for more paper. But now I'm scared of both monkeys and typewriters.

 

Onward.