Things are going to start happening to me now.
Epson shipped it Express Saver, and I picked it up a day early from Fedex. So now it's waiting at home for me.
I really hope this works better than the old one :-/
The carts included in my new Stylus Photo 1400 didn't work (I think the yellow and light cyan carts are flaky). So I had to pull my (nearly-empty) old carts out of the old printer and use them instead. I guess given enough tries Epson will get it all right...
A head alignment looks ok, though there are horizontal lines in the boxes. Let's see about another nozzle check... Also looks fine. "Hello again world" is good. Now for Bill Atkinson's Lab test image...
...Which is a wee bit dark, but otherwise on. No excess ink. Oh, what a relief!
And a test print of Duellists came out well - the color's on, and while it's a bit dark, that's almost certainly reflective vs. transmissive display.
So, I decided I wanted to work on my Russian Hill photo after all. The deep blue doesn't soft-proof well; it prints much darker than the screen display. Other colors are very close, though. So I had to make a number of test prints before I got something fairly good - and that has a faint light streak up one side, which concerns me a bit.
On-screen, the print version is a lot lighter than the image in my portfolio. I edited it with adjustment layers - curves, brightness/contrast - and some masking to apply them selectively. It worked pretty well.
So, next step: Ping Epson about the carts, then pack the old printer up and ship it back.
First, using up my color inks - Once I receive the replacement Y and LC carts (sigh) I'll rustle up some larger paper and try that out - 13"x19", wooo. That probably won't take too long to finish, I guess.
Then... To the UT14 inks! Finally. Which leads to asking - what papers? Ideally I'd buy a couple of samplers from say B&H and try them out, but I don't have any convenient way to make profiles for them, and Paul's profiles cover only a few papers. I guess I'll ask the guys on Yahoo for some advice.
Finally I have received the Y and LC replacement carts. Now I should have a new set of color inks to try out... Time to get some big paper and play with that.
