Jareth,
I am not talking down to you - and you just wrote me at my Facebook again which I really wish you wouldn’t. Here is where you get support. Today it is Saturday here in Vermont - and we are not open for business. Walker is giving a workshop in Chicago which is the first public presentation of the new Pro system. Dana is at home with family. I even wrote you last night after my dinner. Keith is just a guy - although one of the most knowledgeable guys I know - but he is not affiliated in any way with InkjetMall. He is a photographer in New Mexico that just happens to be one of the best Pt/Pd printers in the world. He’s been through it all for many years and we’re very very fortunate that he does care enough about everyone to help them. So you are getting a level of support that you are not going to get elsewhere - I know that for certain.
I tried to explain to you that you do not have bad ink by explaining what bad ink looks like and how it effects an entire color position. I am sorry that I just did not say “you do not have bad ink”. But, I also am trying to train you to help yourself by educating you on these matters, so that when they happen again you have some idea of what is going on.
I have tried to explain to you that your banding is a result of missing or misfiring nozzles. That although you do not believe one missing nozzle matters, or because someone other than we told you it does not, it definitely does. You need to have a perfect nozzle check before you make a film. Period. So you can not make film without banding right now. And you will not unless you get the jets correct.
I went as far as to tell you that if you install the color carts in the printer and you find you can not use the printer for a day or intermittently over a few days and get a perfect nozzle check - then have the printer replaced by Epson.
I do not think that your ink is old or stale - unless you know something about it that I do not - such as you did not shake the bottles before pouring the ink in the carts - or you are drawing off a bottle which had only an inch of ink in it sitting for a year - then yes obviously you are introducing your own problems.
Because you reported that the banding was obvious on other media - that already eliminated the film and because I thought that therefore obvious - I did not mention the film.
We can not possibly know if your printer has electrical problems or a maintenance issue because it is not sitting in front of us. We have reported on the pics you uploaded and pointed out nozzles.
I assumed that you would be using cartridges that come with instructions that are at least as good as ours which is where we obviously point out that you need to have perfect nozzles. I just now realized that you are not using our cartridges - so whoever sold them to you did not think to add that to their instructions.
Because you sourced your own carts that also puts a new variable into the situation which is cartridge performance and partial head starvation which can show up as bouncing nozzles.
Finally - a guess - but you may have a carriage misalignment which I did not consider before because I thought you had made a perfect neg earlier and this was a problem that was new. You reported instead that this is from the get go. So there is some possibility that even with uni-directional printing (and that should be obvious to you but if not, do not print negs bi-directionally), that the misalignment of the entire carriage is causing this problem.
If it is - it will be less easy to detect in color - but when you print color inks on a hard film - and you know what you are looking for - you will see it. And that too, is a reason to have this printer replaced. With a PRO printer they are checked at the factory. You are the final check on a desktop printer - and what is affecting you would not produce a care in the world for 99.9% of the intended customers of these printers.
I am really not certain what more I can tell you at this point. My support of you is genuine and I do appreciate your frustration as we have all been there at some point ourselves. I am wresting today on my day off with a bad printer sensor.
He did mention it in an earlier message too. Your question seems to be suggesting that newer is better, but knowing what we know about head issues on the X900s, I’m not so sure it would be a better gamble than an X880, regardless of the extra channels. It’s a crap shoot either way, especially for anyone without maintenance training or who isn’t inclined to learn. As for me, I like tinkering with machines even if I fail sometimes. I kept that 7600 that I mentioned earlier running well for 10 years, the last 2 or 3 with K7 Carbon (then Sepia) and I knew nothing when I started learning to do serious maintenance on it.