Hi All,
I had the 1160 profiled by Thomas, and the 'banding' wasn't really evident on the first few prints but when I printed one of my food 'smudges' it went to hell. I sent the images over to Thomas and he had a similar experience. Thomas made another profile for me using a different target, it helped a little but the problem still was there. I've since profiled it myself a couple of times with various targets and Spectrolino/Profilemaker but not much of an improvement.
Part of the problem lies apparently in the Epson driver's control of the black ink on the 1160, the other part may have to do with the fact that the files are multishot digital captures. They dont contain the dirt and grain that you get with film which also may help the driver with the tonal transitions, and as they are multishot there is no noise whatsoever. The same files printed on the 2100 are absolutely perfect, as they are on the Sherpa and also the press. One colleague suggested adding in some noise to the file, however I did not invest over €65,000 in digital kit to end up throwing noise into clean images.
I have never bothered to try using anything else on the 1160 other than Epson Photo Paper with Epson's own ink, perhaps this gloss paper may be a contributing factor but then again gloss media was used on the other devices with no problems.
As I have stated on my original post it is not an issue that concerns me, for the relatively paltry amount it cost it has done very well, I really only purchased it out of curiosity after reading about it on ProDig, I simply dont use it for those types of images and as it is soooooo slow it is getting closer and closer to the bin each time it is used, its only saving grace is its cheap running costs, but I think a speedy Canon will probably be taking over its perch pretty soon.
Hope this clears it up for you a bit,
Regards,
Barry
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