Epson 4880 stops printing

Hi,

Twice within the last week my Epson 4880 stop printing at some arbitrary point prior to completing the image.  My print monitor indicated the print was complete fwiw.  The head just parked itself, the pause light is flashing, but nothing else is going on.  The user manual says sometimes the printer may pause while printing to clean the heads but the printer is not making the usual sounds it make when cleaning.  Then something occurred to me – just after sending the image to the printer (via CS 5; ~70 Mb file according to PS), I opened LR 3, which I think I also tried the first time the printer failed to go to completion.  Could this be causing the problem?  Wouldn't this indicate a memory issue?  Does this make sense?  Any help would be appreciated.

If in fact opening LR while CS5 is printing is causing the problem then there could be a bug in LR where it trashes a current print job as it loads. You might want to see if that is repeatable.

Hi EJ,

Thanks – will give it a try. Hopefully this isn't anything more serious ...

It could be that opening Lightroom overtaxes you system so functions are put on hold while it opens. Does is start printing again?

You could also try uninstalling and reinstalling the printer drives, and check to be sure you have the latest ones.

Have Fun,
Jeff

I have a hard time believing that LR 3 behaviour would be so misguided as to cancel an active print job; it seems very unlikely to me. Nor can I think of any other side effects of opening LR that would do it. But as E.J. suggested, test it and see if it's repeatable.

As a side note, if you do use both LR and PS, yet you're currently printing always from PS CS5, I could suggest upgrading to LR 5. Later versions (after 3) of the LR print module do a better job. For anyone who has both PS and LR, and doesn't have a complex printing workflow involving a bunch of PS plugins, I would say always print from LR. It will be less work, and produce quality as good or better.

If it turns out the LR thing is a red herring, then we'd need some more details to start narrowing in on the potential issue. Here are a some things I can think of that might be related:

• What operating system?
• Have you tried opening the operating system print monitor, and see how it progresses at the start of the print and leading up to the abnormal halt? E.g. on Windows you can see the progress of the print job spooling up, and printing. Depending on what's going on in the monitor at the time of opening LR (or whatever else triggers the problem) this may suggest where to look next.
• Is CS5 fully up to date with the last patch provided for it? (Check the version # in the Help > About Photoshop menu.)
• Is your Epson 4880 print driver fully up to date?
• Does the print stop and the paper stays loaded in the printer, or does the print stop and the printer ejects the page?
• When the print stops and the printer pause light starts flashing, does the Epson monitor (not the operating system monitor) have any warning or error message such as paper jam, ink low, etc.?
• Is the paper roll feed or sheet feed?
• If sheet feed, which paper path is it going through?
• What size is the paper?

Wasn't it CS5 that introduced a whole new printing algorithm in one of the updates that required you to uninstall the print driver for the printer and then reinstall it. or something similar. I remember a CS something update that changed the printing engine in Photoshop and made you do something weird to get it all working again.

That said, both CS5 and LR3 are so old, it may be difficult to really figure out what is happening but Royce's questions are the starting place.

Thanks for the replies.

Jeff – No printing does not resume. The head parks itself in its normal standby position, the pause light flashes, and the paper stays in place (does not get ejected). I have to shutdown the printer for the paper to eject and then resubmit the print (which so far has worked to correct the problem).

Royce –

OS = Mac OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard)
Yes I have opened the print monitor and there is nothing unusual – the print request does disappear as though it has finished, even though the print is only half-to-two thirds complete.
I have version PS 12.1 – I haven't checked again but this was the latest when I first installed this (well after 6 and the cloud version were available, so I am certain there isn't anything newer).
I may not have the most recent update to the driver – I just downloaded one that was posted in Oct 2014 (didn't think they would update a driver for such an old OS). Will see what effect this has.
The print stays loaded in the same place when the heads park in standby. The only sound coming form the printer sounds like a fan blowing.
The Epson monitor does not show any error message – it still says printing.
This has happened only with sheet paper but this behavior is new, so I can't say if this won't happen with roll.
The paper was loaded from the paper tray and did not appear to have any feed issues – as I said, the printing halts after about 50-67% of the job is complete.
In both cases I was working with 13x19 paper, but have not tried any other sizes.

I realize my versions of the OS and PS are old. And I do have LR 5 but this requires a newer version of OS X than I have (first time I have encountered this).

Th problem for me is this: my (1Tb) drives are about 67% full right now and I want to upgrade but money is tight. Upgrading to a newer OS has many benefits but also some drawbacks. For instance, I don't want to have to upgrade my Eye One calibration system. I am not sure what other (older versions) software would become obsolete with the OS upgrade. The plan I hatched (but am not certain when I will put it into practice) is to upgrade to larger drives, then partition the boot drive, and leave SL on the small partition. This will allow me to use my Eye One and maybe do all my PS work; I can use the larger drive with a more current version of the OS.

Thanks for the help!

One thing I would definitely do right away is to launch Photoshop and click on Help > Updates just to be sure there isn't anything you missed on the update front to CS5. Do the same thing in LR3.

Then I would go to the Epson site and download the latest driver for your printer and OS and install that.

Check all cables, especially the data cable from the computer to the printer. Maybe even change out the cable and possibly plug it into a different port on the computer.

Then shutdown the system completely and reboot it.

Okay, if the operating system print monitor says the job is finished, but the Epson monitor says still printing, I'd say this means the issue is within the print driver or printer hardware itself, not with the OS or even the printing application. The printer has a buffer, and if the OS monitor says "done", that really just means the last bit of image data was handed down to the printer. As far the OS is concerned, its job is finished, even though printing is still going on.

The Epson monitor says still printing but the hardware has stopped & parked the head. I assume the pause light was not flashing before, but only starts to flash after things hang up. What is the pattern to the flashing? This might be a diagnostic indicator even if the Epson monitor or printer front control panel don't show any warnings or errors.

I've hit some paper feed related issues rarely with my 4880. But so far they've always resulted in the paper ejecting, and/or a warning or error message of some kind. I've never seen a print just hang and never finish. It kind of feels like a hardware issue to me, but I would definitely verify the driver is fully up to date. I have heard of some driver corruption issues on Macs that sometimes requiring completely deleting the printer and driver from Mac OS X, then reinstalling the driver again. This situation doesn't feel like one of those, but it's probably something Epson techs would recommend trying.