Overprinting fails. Why?

[perkin-warbeck]

By "overprinting" I mean (1) making a print on inkjet paper and then (2) feeding the already-printed paper into the printer and printing something else on top of it.

I have tried overprinting on an Epson P5000 and and Epson 4900. Both fail in a very strange way: In step (2), the printer prints part of the way down the page and then ejects the paper, as if to say "All Done!". There's no error message.

The Media Types on the P5000 and 4900 do not include choices such as "Colored Paper" or "Preprinted Paper." I choose the actual Media Type of my paper, e.g., "Premium Presentation Paper Matte."

Why the printer chooses to stop where it does is a mystery. There's nothing particularly significant about the stopping point. Sometimes it overprints 3/4 of the page and refuses to overprint the last 1/4. Other times it overprints the first 1/4 of the page and refuses to overprint the last 3/4.

Turning off Paper Skew check, Paper Size check, and Refresh Margin has no effect.

 

[perkin-warbeck]

I got a definitive answer from Epson support. You can't overprint on a P5000, a 4900, or any other wide-format printers. The printers that CAN overprint have Media Types like "Preprinted" and "Colored paper." These are consumer-level all-in-one printers.

A wide-format printer is constantly looking ahead for white paper as it prints. If it sees an area of dark paper, it may assume it has reached the end of the paper and will then eject the paper. It overrides the height specification in Page Setup. Maybe this is a safety feature. There is no way to turn it off and there is no way to add new Media Types which would allow printing on preprinted or colored paper.

You'd think there would be a caveat in the manual. There is not. I suggested they add one.