Print oddity... anyone ever seen this before?

Hey guys/gals,

I just recently got into doing my own prints from my digital photography. You
may remember a recent post from me, claiming my print noobiness and asking
about manipulating print sizes and such. So on to my question...

Over the weekend, my son wanted me to shoot and print some of his toy cars
in his collection. I did so and got some very nice prints for him... BUT, on one
of the prints, I had a very odd pattern print out across a car in the image.

Here is a .jpg (shot in raw, CS2 .jpg output) of the original:

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'text/html' | Byte size: ZERO

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'text/html' | Byte size: ZERO

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'text/html' | Byte size: ZERO

Looks like one of the inks is out.

Either ink is out or you need to clean the print head. Check under maintenance of your printer.

Printer is new, ink carts are all around 75% full. Print heads cleaned twice during this.... still same result.

Thanks anyway

Replace the print heads? If that's possible on your printer.

Try reseating the cartridge. I had similar things happend when I first used my printer. I found a cartridge was not seating fully.

hmmm... if it were due to the carts needing re-seating, then wouldn't i be experiencing problems on ALL prints? I've gone through 25 or 30 full sheets in the past week or so and this is the one this happens with. All the other prints have been great.

I'll just chalk it up to mystery... as long as it only happens iwth one image, then I'm not too worried about it.

William

The Ferrari is Macrovision protected so that you can't print pictures of it.

Try re-saving the image as a targa or something and print it again.

Nice shot! Here's a link I ran across for tabletop shots of model cars: "Cobra on the Water"

If you have not been able to rectify this by reseating the carts and "cleaning" the head throught printer commands here is a possible solution. I've replaced the heads(both) in our Roland twice. Not fun.

DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK THOUGH.

Pigment inks are water soluble.
Turn the printer off and unplug.
Move the print-head carriage away from its docking position.
There should be a "capping station" that covers the head when not in use to prevent drying.
"Puddle" a small ammount of warm, not hot, distilled water in the capping station and replace the print-head carriage.
Let sit over night.
This may help unclog and clean the surface of the head.

About print heads... They are delicate as all heck on the main face of the head, the side facing the media. I've heard of people using alcohol to clean a head - not the best thing to do as it drys out the head even more and can cause an unrecoverable clog.
Also, head-strikes can be the death of a printer. If the head would crash into or scrapes along the surface of any media you could be in for a world of hurt.

Good luck.

This may sound nutso, but is there not a possibility here that somewhere in the printing workflow there is a strange conversion to a destination profile such that the printer is showing the artifacts of an out of gamut condition with that particular shade of blue that turns into that strange striped magenta?

Sounds reasonable to me Mr. Lay. While I appreciate the responses I've gotten so far, I was surprised to see many of them when considering the mention that ALL other pictures print perfectly. It certainly wasn't print head issues but more than likely something along the lines you mentioned. I figured that perhaps the shading on that blue somehow resulted in something out of the range of the color gamut I was using. However, the pattern persisted in a number of other variations, so I never could come up with anything other than guesses.

I've done a few more prints since then and still no problems.

Thanks
William

Rough test - cut that car out and paste it at least 3 times at various angles, one per layer. (The lines really throw me.) Play with saturation and/or hue and print it and see what you get.

William Taylor wrote:
Sounds reasonable to me Mr. Lay. While I appreciate the responses I've gotten so far, I was surprised to see many of them when considering the mention that ALL other pictures print perfectly. It certainly wasn't print head issues but more than likely something along the lines you mentioned. I figured that perhaps the shading on that blue somehow resulted in something out of the range of the color gamut I was using. However, the pattern persisted in a number of other variations, so I never could come up with anything other than guesses.

I've done a few more prints since then and still no problems.

Thanks
William

Totally missed the bottom of the post, sorry about that.

It could be a profile issue, but as you said all other prints are ok.
So that seems unlikely.
Unless the file has an embedded profile that went psycho.

Could be a corrupt file.

What trips me out is that the banding is only on the car.

It's semms like the blue channel got blown-out/corrupted.

William Taylor wrote:
Sounds reasonable to me Mr. Lay. While I appreciate the responses I've gotten so far, I was surprised to see many of them when considering the mention that ALL other pictures print perfectly. It certainly wasn't print head issues but more than likely something along the lines you mentioned. I figured that perhaps the shading on that blue somehow resulted in something out of the range of the color gamut I was using. However, the pattern persisted in a number of other variations, so I never could come up with anything other than guesses.

I've done a few more prints since then and still no problems.

Thanks
William

Tnx for the update - I will stay tuned!