Piezography Ink Install Instructions for the Epson® Stylus Pro 7800/7880 & 9800/9880 Printers

How to install and use Piezography ink on the 7800, 7880, 9800, 9880 printers.

Summary

Use these procedures to convert your color printer to a Piezography printer. The placement of the shades of Piezography ink are critical and not arbitrary. You must refer to the shade placement chart provided here on this document. Most Piezography systems depend upon the QuadtoneRIP software with which to control the ink shades. Installation instructions and support of that software is provided by the manufacturers of those software. We provide our own guides to our suggested use of QuadToneRIP, so that you can get the best results from that product. Additionally, Piezography on the Mac requires the use of Print-Tool. This software has quickly become a defacto utility for anyone wanting to properly color manage their printing workflow. A full manual for Piezography can be downloaded with the free Piezography Community Edition.

Verify that your printer functions.

Verify that your printer functions perfectly with Epson inks before installing Piezography inks. In addition to printing a perfect nozzle check, make certain that the printer does not have unfixable banding problems by making test prints. Take the time to scrutinize your printer’s performance before the next step. It is not possible to diagnose many printing problems on a printer that has not first been tested with Epson inks. Ideally you should also align your print-head for UniDirectional printing before switching to Piezography inks.

If you are having problems with your printer or print-head, please look at our detailed instructions on how to clean your print head.

Printer Testing

Verify that your printer functions perfectly with Epson inks before installing Piezography inks. In addition to printing a perfect nozzle check, make certain that the printer does not have unfixable banding problems by making test prints. Take the time to scrutinize your printer’s performance before the next step. It is not possible to diagnose many printing problems on a printer that has not first been tested with Epson inks. Ideally you should also align your print-head for UniDirectional printing before switching to Piezography inks.

If you are having problems with your printer or print-head, please look at our detailed instructions on how to clean your print head.

Ink change procedure steps (for both Flush carts and Piezography carts)

1. Test the printer with Epson inks, and have the necessary equipment on hand.
2. Make sure your black cartridge chip matches the cartridge you have in the printer no matter what ink you actually have in the Piezography black cartridge. eg: if you have a photo black cartridge in your printer and you are going to print with matte black Piezography ink, make sure you are using a "photo black" chip on your Piezography cartridge. This saves time and money. If you don't have a photo black chip you can carefully pry off the OEM PK chip and place it on your Piezography cartridge. Here are video instructions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ecF_usso_w
3. Turn off the printer, raise the ink levers, and remove the remaining Epson cartridges from the printer.
4. Install the flush or ink cartridges in the printer, and lower the ink levers.
5. Hold down the MENU/RIGHT, DOWN, CUT/EJECT/CENTER buttons simultaneously as you turn on the printer. This activates the Service Menu.
6. The ink change procedure for this printer is performed using an INITIAL FILL procedure. This option is found in the SELF TESTING > CLEANING menu. Follow the prompts on the LCD screen, and hit the execute button to begin the initial fill.
7. During this fill sequence, the printer will ask you to raise and lower the levers several times. If you notice ink cartridges disconnecting from their sensors due to the wiggle of the ink levers, carefully and gently place small cardboard shims under the ink cartridges where they go into the ink bay. This will keep them in place during the init-fill procedure. Every once and a while a cartridge chip will not read properly during the initial fill procedure. This can make the printer get stuck in an init-fill cycle (turning the power off does not cancel the init fill). Click here for instructions on how to cancel the initial fill on your printer.
8. After the initial fill cycle finishes, restart the printer.
9. If you have just installed Piezography ink, print a nozzle check pattern. If the ink channels are still stained with the original color inks, run a KK2 cleaning cycle to clear out the old inks. The KK2 cleaning option is found in the SELF TESTING > CLEANING menu. After the KK2 cleaning, print another nozzle check pattern. You should find that the color stains are gone and the printer is ready for Piezography printing.
10. If you have just installed the flush cartridges, turn off the printer, allow it to sit overnight or longer (longer periods of time are not harmful to the printer), and then repeat the above steps to put the ink set in the printer. Allowing the printer to remain filled with flush fluid will help remove residue from the previous ink set.

Important Note: Do not rely on the "automatic" nozzle check cycle when running Piezography inks. The printer does not recognize the ink densities of the patterns and will determine the print head is clogged, even if it is not. Use the "manual" nozzle check cycle instead.

Storage of previously used ink cartridges

You may wish to remove and save one or more cartridges that you have removed from your printer, for use in the future. If you want to store your cartridges for later use, place the removed cartridges in plastic bags, close the bags tightly to minimize ink evaporation, and place the cartridges in a box so that they sit upright, as they do when they are in the printer. Storing a previously opened cartridge on its side or upside down will allow ink to leak out of the air vent holes. We recommend taping over the vent holes to prevent evaporation. Many of our ink cartridge (large and small) come with vent-hole plugs. Make sure to place these vent-hole plugs back into the cartridge before storage. Make sure to remember to remove them when you want to use the cartridge again though!

Note: On small format cartridges, it is very important that you do not allow ink to touch the air inlet filter. Make sure your cartridges remain upright at all times.

Getting started with Piezography printing and QuadtoneRIP.

Now that you have your inks installed, you must print your images through QuadToneRIP shareware software. It is not possible to achieve good results without using QuadToneRIP. Go here to download and install QuadtoneRIP for Mac or PC.

We provide a comprehensive user manual for Piezography along with a set of pre-made curves "profiles" for use with QuadtoneRIP and various fine-art inkjet papers. After installing QuadtoneRIP make sure to ask download and install our free Community Edition set of curves and documentation. This will guide you through the process of installing your Piezograhy printer on both Windows and Mac operating systems so you can print.

Supported Papers

We support an ever evolving list of fine art inkjet papers. You can see the list of officially supported papers here. Please note that this list is new as of 2016 and we have not yet updated every curve for every inkset and every printer and every paper (over 1500 different curves). This will take some time. Many curves work perfectly for a vast amount of differently branded papers. The Hahnemuhle Photo Rag curve (for example) will work just fine on Moab Entrada Rag. If you do not see your paper listed in the pre-made set of curves available from the Piezography Community Edition download, experiment by using a curve made for a similar paper.

Technical Support

We provide free technical support at our forum at http://inkjetmall.com/tech. We also provide direct paid phone support at inkjetmall. Before requesting support please register on our forum and also look through all of the support documents on our Piezography Knowledge Base web page.

Frequently Asked Questions

You may find it very helpful to view our F.A.Q. section for Piezography. This will tell you a lot!