Anomalogical Observation No.2 - Short Memory

Canceling Job Via 9900 May Cause Loss of Prefs

You know how annoying it is to lose your printing preferences, right. That very thing happened to me this evening, after canceling a printing job via the Epson® 9900 control panel instead of by the computer. When I went to reprint, all saved setting had vanished.

At first I couldn't believe it... I thought I was losing my mind and had done something wrong. Then I discovered that it was the machine that had lost its mind, not me.

Why I canceled the job is a story in itself.

I have gotten used to doing nozzle checks, which regularly reveal that if the printer sits idle for longer than 36 hours, the vivid magenta will clog, requiring cleaning. And, sure enough, after slightly less than that, the 9900 was telling me it wanted yet another cleaning for vivid magenta and this time also black.

Recall that an earlier blog, Anomalogical Observation No. 1, concerned an inaccurate ink-level display for black... the display warned that the level was 1%. That blog was written a month ago, or so it seems, and the machine still hasn't run out of black (although it really should about now). So black has been a suspect for a long time, and now the machine was telling me to clean that print-head pair. Fair enough, I reckoned and began the procedure. [Early blogs are at http://gicleeprepress.blogspot.com]

Flashing bold red type on the 9900 display panel warned that there was insufficient ink for a cleaning. The machine suggested continuing by replacing the ink cartridge... but which one? Five of the inks have been flashing low level warnings for a l-o-n-g time. It's really gotten to be a 'cry wolf' kind of thing and I stopped paying attention to the light show on the control panel (which looks especially impressive if you turn off all the room lights).

The machine provided nary a clue about what to do next. So I decided I didn't want to play.

Using the 9900 control panel, the is an option to cancel the job... so I pressed OK to that option... and when I went to reprint, that's when I discovered that all the saved printing preferences had disappeared. '#%@&%', I swore in Swedish.

If it were 'just' a few prefs I wouldn't be fuming. But at Vashon Island Imaging we work with a lot of artists and use a lot of different stocks as a result. Now all those profiles need to be set up again. So much for closing up 'early' tonight.