# Please help diagnose this ghosting problem?



## Sugarcaine (Oct 17, 2014)

Hi,

Been doing dye sub for a few years, mostly making name badges and interior signage. Everything was working smoothly with a partially new system (Windows 7, CorelDraw X7, Epson Artisan 1430, Artainium UV+ inks) until one day last week when this started happening:

on the print (not the pressed image) is a "ghosting" or a "shift" - the image below shows it printed onto regular paper. You can see it most clearly in the inner points of the "W" and the "A". (This is an iPhone photo of the print, hence the poor focus, sorry. Best I could do.)

It doesn't seem to be a printer problem. The printer (and the CISS) is new, and it prints things from other applications clearly and without the ghosting. Also, if I print this same image without using the Artainium settings/ICC profile, it prints without the ghosting (but it doesn't print the color correctly without the ICC profile). 

Clean nozzle checks. Reasonable horizontal alignment (I'm not sure what "perfect" might be, but the most solid boxes are 4,5,6). If I print Landscape, the ghosting appears on the top/bottom of the image; if I print Portrait, it's on the right/left of the image. Black text and crop marks are affected as well as the red logo graphic. Other graphics/colors are affected, as are older files.

Sawgrass (I know! I know! But I'm stuck with them!) won't support because I'm using "expired" 50% off inks from LRi, and I'm using expired inks meant for other Epson printers (the Sawgrass tech was apparently either lying or wrong about why that was an issue). They also tell me that even if I rush out and buy fresh new inks, that I've ruined my CISS and will need a new one of those, too.

I'm convinced that it's a settings problem or an ICC problem but it's going to cost me $1,000 to even get support from Sawgrass. My expired inks have been working just fine up until one day last week... no color discrepancies... no clogging... clean nozzle checks in a new printer. I haven't knowingly changed any settings. I did recently add an outline to the fonts on my main template to "extra-bold" the letters to match our partners' output because they just upgraded to a Ricoh system with gel ink, and I need to match their output. Adding that outline didn't mess up the print, this started happening several days after that. 

My second problem is that now, I HAVE changed settings - I realized with some horror that when I set up my new system, I failed to go through and set all the Document and Default and print settings according to the WinProfile Print Setup Guide for CorelDRAW X7... so I did all that, and downloaded a fresh copy of the Artainium ICC profile for the Artisan 1430 (which is TWO files, a Win1.0 and a Win_Classic, which I don't remember seeing before). And now my color is off (way off!) and I can't get it back to what it was before because I don't know what the ICC profile was that I was using before I downloaded the fresh ones. I even removed and reinstalled CorelDraw to get the Default, Document, and Print settings to re-default. It's possible I didn't have any ICC profile on board, I guess? But my one particular red color was spot-on, and now I can't get it back to where it was.  

Any thoughts? Advice?


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## uncletee (Feb 25, 2007)

try a few different printer settings? see if anything changes. good luck uncletee


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## binki (Jul 16, 2006)

Needs a print head alignment it looks like


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## Sugarcaine (Oct 17, 2014)

Thanks... I tried every printer setting I could think of.  The only thing that seemed to "fix" it was turning off the ICC profile... but that isn't going to work for obvious reasons.


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## Sugarcaine (Oct 17, 2014)

binki said:


> Needs a print head alignment it looks like


That was my first thought. I think I ran the Vertical Alignment Tool about a hundred times. Then I questioned whether I was looking at what I was supposed to be looking at, and researched it on YouTube to make sure the boxes were supposed to be the "most solid" and I still don't fully understand what makes a "perfect" alignment test. Should all the best boxes be 5's?

In any case, all the alignment in the world made zero difference.  

And the only thing that helps is turning off the Artainium settings, but then the color is out of whack. 

I'm going to buy a fresh set of inks and another brand-new CIS and see if that fixes it. (Naturally, that's what Sawgrass told me. Spend a thousand bucks and we'll go from there.) 

Meanwhile, I brought my 1400 back from the nearly-dead and am hoping it holds out until I get the 1430 running again.


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