Piezography Ink Install Instructions for the Epson® Photo 1400 and 1430 Printers
How to install and use Piezography ink on the 1400 and 1430.
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.
Small Format Ink change procedure
- Test the printer with Epson inks to verify that it functions perfectly, as described above.
- Push the ink change button, and when the print head moves to the cartridge change position, remove the Epson cartridges and install the cartridges after you have peeled off the vent tabs (note: before putting the Piezography cartridges in your printer, look at the air vent holes that had been covered with the vent tabs. Make sure that the holes are open, and are not blocked with a little piece of vent tab or dried ink. If you think that the vent holes are blocked, poke a pin through the tab material, into the vent hole, to vent the cartridge). Close the cartridge lids and return the print head to the parked position, by pushing the ink change button again.
- The printer will sense that new cartridges have been installed and will run through a small purge cycle, that will take a minute or so. Run two additional print head cleaning cycles, to ensure that you have removed the color inks from your system.
- Verify that you have a perfect nozzle check pattern before printing images. The pattern will consist of six sections, of different shades of gray. The lightest shades may be incredibly faint.
- If you are using a Gloss Optimizer, run the nozzle check on Glossy Paper and hold the paper at an angle to a light. You will see the nozzles show up as a gloss reflection against the light.
Epson 1400 & 1430 Specs & Ink Placement Chart
Ink Options:
1) Piezography K6 (Matte ONLY) *
2) Piezography K6 Digital Negative **
Printer Specs & Review:
Although only a six ink 13″ printer, the Epson 1400/1430 has such a tiny drop size that Piezography K6 looks indistinguishable from the K7 ink set on 7+ ink printers. This printer cannot print non-matte. There are not enough ink positions to run our glossy compatible ink sets. It will not print on glossy, semi-glossy, lustre, pearl nor even the baryta papers. Stick to fine art inkjet paper and you will be in heaven with this bargain machine.
The paper handling is a little difficult sometimes on thicker sheets and may require some hand-feeding from time to time. Otherwise it’s a fantastic printer for the money and it’s often available at the Epson refurb store for $149.00. New it sells from about $219 to $299 (for as long as it will be available.) Don’t let the fact that its a dye based printer scare you from putting pigment ink into it. Piezography inks are encapsulated, which means each pigment particle is actually encased in a thin-micro layer of acrylic co-polymer to eliminate the ability for the static charge in the pigment to attract any other pigment particle. The result is no clogging; not even in the tiny heads of the Epson 1400.
We created Piezography Special Edition specifically on this printer. It’s most beautiful incarnation is on the Epson 1400. If your aesthetics tend towards platinum/palladium style photography – Special Editions K6 and the 1400/1430 are impossible to beat. However, the printer is such a bargain priced machine that we encourage photographers to buy several, install them vertically on a restaurant rack t save room, and print with several of the Piezography K6 ink sets.
Ink Placement Chart:
|
Cartridge Position |
1) Piezography K6 Matte |
2) Piezography PiezoDN |
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Yellow |
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Black |
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Light Cyan |
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Light Magenta |
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Magenta |
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Cyan |
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NOTES |
* Use 1400/1430 K6 curves. |
** Use 1400/1430 PiezoDN curves |
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!