St Croix River Road Ramblings

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Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Epson WF 7620 Banner Print

This is purely an educational post that explains how to take advantage of an Epson WF 7620 printer to make a banner as big as 13x47.24 inches (the limit of the printer). 
  I have one of these printers and the Luck museum has one.  We bought them because they have an 11x17 scan/copy area and can print on up to 13x18 size paper (all measurements are inches).  
  The printer is reasonably decent output, but as the clerk at Best Buy told me, "if you don't print regularly with Epson printers, the heads clog up."  She was right!!!
  However, I have found that I can unclog the heads by following the DIY information found on the internet that includes soaking the heads over a wet paper towel and if needed, gently syringing distilled water through them.  Something one shouldn't have to do!
  Anyway, the printer specifications claim to print banners up to 47.24 inches long. (that comes from the metric 120 cm long and 33 cm wide maximums which may be some metric standard? ).
  I bought a roll of cheap paper at Walmart in the art supplies area.  It is like typing paper only on a roll and 12 inches by 100 feet.  I cut off 48 inches of it and tried to feed it into the single sheet feeder, but it was too floppy.  So I taped the leading edge to a sheet of heavier 12x18 paper and that would let the printer grab the paper and feed it through OK.  Once it gets started through, it goes the rest of the way fine. 
  Next I tried to find a program that will let me do a page layout of 12x47.24.   Word will do 12x22 -- and no longer.  Printshop 13x18 and nothing longer.  However, Open Office (the free word processor) lets me define any size. Wonder why the other programs don't? 
   I went to the printer setup on my computer and defined a "Banner" paper type of 12x47.24.  Then I designed a poster and printed it to the Epson selecting the rear feed, the new Banner paper size and pushed the print button.  It worked!!! 
  Of course, since the paper was not glossy, the quality was not wonderful, and the Epson was not printing through all of the nozzles as usual, so a little streaky until I told it to print slow and high quality.  And I have to cut the tape holding the back stiffener paper off.  
       Imagine this 47.24 inches long and 12 inches tall.  Now I think I will see if I can find 13 inch rolls of glossy ink paper.  
     I tried to find out how to do this on the internet, but nothing for the Epson WF 7620.  Some printers have a roll feed paper and cutter built in, but not mine.  However it is pretty handy to have a 4 foot poster.
  What is my rating for the printer?  It does pretty good with the scanner top feed.  I can scan double sided and up to about 25 pages at a time without much trouble jamming unless it is very thin paper or badly wrinkled.  The scan quality can be set to be plenty high for the museum.  I can scan to a flash drive, SD card, my computer or the cloud.  
   I have it networked at home and that works fine. At the museum the networking would sometimes drop out, so I just hooked it directly to the computer.   
  The ink is very expensive and it does use a lot.  At home I refill my own cartridges with pigment ink and at the museum we buy them.  Their first printer clogged so bad, I took it back after a year (we had a 3 -year extended Best Buy warranty--and they gave us a new one).  That one also had some error messages indicating stuck paper or something.  I have had my own for nearly 3 years now and other than the clogging nuisance, it works pretty good.  I don't print a lot and that is my problem too.  The heads are expensive, but replaceable -- but cost nearly as much as the printer ($200 for the printer, $120 for the heads).  They have "micro fine" holes that are almost impossible to keep functioning without a daily print with each color and black. 
   Every inkjet printer I ever had clogged, so I expect that.  The old HP's were easiest -- their print head was right in the cartridge and every time you bought a new cartridge you got to start over new.  My Kodak was terrible, and all of my Epson's spent about as much time having the heads being soaked as they did printing even with Epson ink cartridges.