Epson ET-8550 A3+ poster board printing via rear paper feed. Using 13x19 Epson Matte board board

hi my name is keith cooper and uh in this short video i'm gonna have a look at printing on poster board on the epson et 8550 now the 8550 is an interesting printer in the desert hybrid ink set that contains both pigment black and dye based black which has some interesting results when printing pictures as to what you can get out of it but it also has a direct feed at the back for a straight through path and i'm going to be using some epson enhanced matte poster board now this is actually double sided and here's a sheet of the stuff as you can see it is bored there is no way it's going to go in through the top loading slot it needs a straight through print path now with other epson printers i've looked at recently there's been a front loading system where you put the card in push it through put it up to an alignment marker it takes it through it prints it that's not so with the 8550 this part here that i've removed this unclips from the back this is the duplex unit so this is the bit that takes ordinary copier paper if you're doing document printing double-sided that reverses it it also takes the paper out turns it round and rotates it back to go in through the printer so this fits in the back here and there are two spring clips on either side you should i know have to lift this up the rear feed to be able to get it because when this is closed there's a cover drops down over it so you can't see this but i've taken this out so i've got access but there's one more thing you need to do and that is this little gray bit of plastic here which just unclips we don't need this currently and put that aside and this gray clip just clips in there now there are some instructions written on the back here that you can follow as well and give you a guide to do any and that's a paper guide so there are two blue slide rails that slide backwards and forwards and they set the width of the paper now this is an a3 plus or 13 inch printer so this piece of board is 13 inch by 19 inch and as a paper as a print surface it behaves like epson matte so i have a profile for this now it happens to be double-sided i'm going to do double-sided here but um it's available i've got this in a3 plus and a2 sizes you will have to hunt about a bit for it it's not necessarily widely stocked but this is an epson product so well at least here in the uk it's an epson product um i don't know about other areas you'll need to have hunt and find out for it but what i need to do is send a print to this and it hopefully will give me instructions to load the card or we shall see what happens now i'm printing this image from photoshop i would normally use epson print layout and here are the settings i normally consider using however there appears to be a bug relating to the a550 in some aspects of 8550 printing from epson print layout it works in many instances but with this one when i try it it tells me it can't load the printer driver settings this could be a macbook it could be anything so i'll just go back over to print from photoshop now i've set a preset here and i'm using a3 plus rear feed slot i've set velvet fine art paper the reason it's velvet final paper rather than epson matte is because i've made profiles for both media settings and decided that the velvet fine art paper or vfa setting is actually better gives me better looking results than the using the matte setting this varies a lot by paper type and is why it's very important to get the right profiles for when you're printing with the 8550 makes a difference between rubbish prints and great prints very easily i've not come across a printer before and it's probably because of the hybrid ink set where getting everything right in terms of your print settings and your paper choices is so important but anyway those are the settings i've scaled the image and i'm printing as i say directly here you'll notice at the bottom of the image a hefty margin you always get that with rear feeds on board you'll never get borderless on this if you want borderless printing you can do it on ordinary paper via the top and it prints fine at 83 plus but certainly not with this one but anyway i've made all my selections here selected the right profile you'll see it's a ridiculously high resolution of 895 pixels per inch that's because this is meant as a much much bigger print but i happen to know that scaling it like this causes no problem whatsoever other than its big file so we'll just hit print and wait and see what happens so i've started off the print and i'm going to see what happens here and it should give me advice on how to feed the paper preparing to print from the rear paper feed slot do not load paper so i was right in not doing this remove the rear cover install the rear feed unit there's a small video on here an animation that you can do here so i just look at that and that just tells me to look at that well that could have been a bit more positive the board doesn't fit quite right into the guide there it is however i can hear it printing and i can see the board moving through we will see in a while just what results going to look like well it's printing as it goes without saying that if you are going to print like this um you're not going to do it with the printer in what would be its normal orientation facing here with the back of this side it's going to go through this way so if you're going to think of printing thick paper on this um my first thoughts are if you're going to do it very often you're probably going to really be thinking of a different printer to this because you have to to make this print have to remove the duplex unit and in removing the duplex unit that means that i can't use the normal paper feed so it's one of those bits where yes this is an occasional function um and according to the blurb i should be able to although not with a mac driver i should be able to do prints up to two meters long with this now where i can get two meter photo board of the right sort is a mystery to me i've never seen the stuff but um there you go so this is really just a proof of concept and for those of you who wonder what i do when i do printer testing other than just you know run prints through and do things like that it's stuff like this push the envelope um just see whether it really will work with a particular media so hence i put canvas in and all kinds of other stuff through printers uh it helps that this is epson sprinter so i'm a little less concerned about it not working but um we shall see it seems to be feeding through okay it's coming out at the front although the leading edge looks fine so in printing this bit of board two issues really uh one is that the board is fractionally too thick for the guides at the back uh which is going to make slight issues in feeding well that's that's fair enough um i believe the fitness is supported so it's a matter of those little guides at the back there and the second aspect is what am i going to do with this well i'll put it back in because i'm not going to be printing very often like this um i have made some panoramic prints where uh there's some in some other videos i've shown cutting a strip of paper off a roll flattening it as much as you can feeding it in this way it works fine what i would say if you are thinking of using this rear feed for printing long prints i want a good reason to use it such as board like this that you know stiff board well there goes the end of the uh card there you can see it gradually feeding through and it's coming out this end as well so it looks to be a tolerable print although i have noticed a white mark on part of the sky the picture because one of the things i forgot to do when i pulled a sheet out of this box was give it a good dust some papers are prone to slight flaking around the edges where they're cut these flakes can get onto the surface of the paper and then when they go through the printer the flake comes off and it's the flake that's been printed on so minus the flake little tiny little white patch so in this instance it looks like not only do i have a very slight mark where i push the paper a bit hard into the printer i have a tiny fleck of white on the sky now that can actually be relatively easy easily retouched if it's that important but uh it's just the sort of precautions you need to take with printing with a card like this some photo papers do it as well the older version of epson tpp traditional photo paper was very prone to flaking to the extent that when i first tested it this quite a few years ago when it first came out i got a feather brush and actually went over the surface to make sure there were no flakes on it because it is really annoying when you make a big print and it comes out and it has a tiny little white patch on it but that's just something to be wary of for any printer with certain types of media so the printer can print a3 plus on board epson print layout at the moment the version i have on my mac has a glitch in it that doesn't allow you to print so i would normally print this for you know certainly to show these videos using epson print layout mainly because i'm using an old version of photoshop on a mac which means it's almost certainly going to look different for whatever you're printing on epson print layout is usually a very reliable and good piece of software that i'm quite happy to use and here we have the print um that actually looks rather good i'm gonna say it looks better than i expected it would um i don't know what i was expecting to go wrong but um there you go one footprint i could put this back through print on the other side personally i think with this print that is chancing your arm a bit um even leaving this to dry for quite a while i suspect it could be um it could be some time and it would easily mark but there we have one board print for that um so they go hopefully these short usage reviews are useful for people um i'm quite deliberately leaving slight mistakes and things in it to show things that could go wrong to show that i press i test dozens and dozens of printers and i get things wrong so don't worry about it too much if you do please feel free to ask questions um via the comments subscribe to the channel if you find it interesting i'll have some more on this and i'm hoping we're in the next week or so to have the actual main review of the printer which is a roundup of everything that i've tested with it done so thank you very much you

Channel: Keith Cooper

Views: 5,547

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Id: eG1gIbsyMEg

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 20 2021