Epson Artisan 730 - missing lines/ink flecks with dark colours when printing on transparency

[pinni137]

Hi everyone!

A few months ago, I bought an Epson Artisan 730 secondhand off ebay to print some cards on transparencies. This printer isn't made to print transparencies - if you try to feed the sheet of transparency as is, the printer just spits it out without printing anything on it. I get around this by taping the two vertical sides with masking tape to "trick" the printer into thinking the transparency is paper. I've been doing this for the past few months with relatively no fuss.

Recently, I've been having some issues with missing lines when printing dark colours, especially black. The setting I print with is the "plain papers" setting on best photo with edge smoothing and no high speed because that's the setting that lets my printer print the slowest. The strange thing is that if I print on "Epson ultra glossy" on best photo with edge smoothing and no high speed, it prints a little faster with no missing lines - all the colours turn out really nice and smooth, but with one caveat: some of the black lines end up "smudging" and putting little flecks of ink onto the image. I've tried messing around with different colour profiles and adjustments but it seems to come down to the speed at which the image is printed. (image here because I think the embed function isn't working for me). I've also tried the other settings like matte and photo etc but they all turn out the same as ultra glossy.

All my inks are at a good level (just changed the black one too) and I've done several printer head alignment calibrations both with 80gsm paper and transparency. I've been printing at least once a week to keep the printer head from drying out (I've also tried cleaning the printer head with printer cleaning solution and a nozzled-syringe). Another thing is that when I print with 80gsm paper, the printer seems to always feed two pieces at a time, so there might be something wrong with the rollers from what I've read about printers grabbing more than one sheet? When I print with transparency this doesn't happen, however.

I hope this is enough information. If anyone has any idea of how I can fix this, I would really appreciate it. Thanks in advance to anyone who can help or for just reading my post!

 

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You'll want to print off a nozzle check from the maintenance tab in printing preferences to check for any missing (clogged) nozzles.

The Black ink on the Artisan 730 and the equivalents is known to clog up over time so it may be that you need to get a fresh black and get it installed to flush things through a little..

Oh and trying to clean the printhead manually is next to impossible due to the non return valves in the printhead so you probably won't have managed to get it sorted.

One tip worth keeping in mind is that you can purchase replacement printheads from Aliexpress relatively inexpensively and they do seem to work from the feedback I've received over the years. There's no replacement waste pads for any of the Artisan 700 - 800 series though so if you do hit service required you'll want an external waste ink tank to potty train the thing.

Hope that's of some help.

 

[pinni137]

I'll definitely look into that replacement printhead and external waste ink tank! I think I've just hit service required on my current waste pad as well.

Thank you so much for the tips, I really appreciate it