Resources for Epson Inkjet Printers

Banner Paper Loading Tip

Q:  How do I load banner paper into my Epson printer?



A:  Use a magazine or brochure (I use the epson paper manual that comes with

the roll paper).  Put the end of the paper in the middle of the pages.

Then roll the manual in the opposite direction to the roll paper curl.

Roll it into a tight curl about 3 inches (or so) around.  Hold it that way

for 10 sec or so, the remove the paper end and insert it into the printer.

Hit the button and it should load cleanly.

900 vs 960 quick review

EXAMPLE: A 960 can crank out an 8x10 image on 8.5x11 paper 

in about 2 minutes.  It takes a 900 or a 1280 printer a little longer 

to do the same.  BUT when you ask these two printers to make a 

borderless 8x10 print on the borderless paper, it take about 3 

times as long!  Many of my customers would just a soon trim the 

8.5 x 11 print down to the 8x10 image (with a good RotaTrim 

paper cutter)!



(The 960 will do 5x7 and 4x6 borderless, but not 8x10 --the 900 

can do 8x10 borderless, as you mentioned.)



Now let's compare some the other difference between the 900 

and the 960:



900 price is $199

960 price is $349



The 960 has a roll feed system and auto paper cutter 

attachment, the 900 does not.  (In my recent post on the 2200 

printer, you'll see that I'm not too keen on roll paper systems 

because of their lack of economy, but they are very useful if you 

plan to print odd sizes, especially panorama images.)



Both have a rear feed path that can handle thick media (up to 

1.3mm), which is why they both can print on CDs.



As you mentioned, the 960 uses individual ink carts for each 

color, whereas the 900 uses the two cart system like your 1270.  

Individual ink tanks can save you between 20% and 40% on your 

color ink costs, especially when you are doing a lot of prints of 

the same image file, where one color or two colors are being 

used more than the other colors.  But even without doing that, 

most images will use up the light magenta or the light cyan (or 

both) more than the other colors --causing you to toss the 900 

carts sooner (with the other color cells being wasted --and your 

money).  In addition, the 960 carts have about 33% more color 

ink capacity than each of the same color cell in the 900 color 

cartridge.



On the speed side, the 960 is much faster than the 900, and 

faster than your old 1270.  The 960 has twice as many nozzles 

(96) per color as the 900 (48), and the 960 has 4 times as many 

black nozzles (192) as the 900 (48) --making it very fast when 

printing text.  Although the 960 is a 6-color printer (black and 5 

colors), it actually uses 7 carts (2 black carts and 5 color carts).  

The 2 black cartridges are the same SKU#, you just need 2 of 

them to operate the printer.



On the resolution side, the 900 will give you up to 5760 horizontal 

resolution and 720 vertical resolution (5760 x 720 dpi).  However, 

I believe the 960's ability to produce 1440 vertical resolution is 

more useful and important even though it has a lower horizontal 

resolution of 2880 (2880 x 1440 dpi).  You'll rarely need to go 

2880 x 1440 (most prints look just as good at 1440 x 720), but 

occasionally you'll run into a color scheme and image pattern 

that causes banding at 1440 x 720, and going to 2880 x 1440 will 

eliminate the problems.  The ability to go to 5760 dpi horizontal 

on the 900 doesn't usually fix as many of these problems --its 

more often used as a fix for smoothing type in black ink printing.



The fact that the 960 has a minimum ink droplet size of 2 

picoliters, vs. the 900's 4 picoliter is another advantage for the 

960.  Smaller droplet size can significantly improve the 

smoothness and tonal separation of your image highlight areas.



In overall reliability, the 960 has a higher duty cycle rating 

(25,000) than the 900 (16,000).

How Epson Printers Print (Technical)

Date: Wed, 7 Jun 2000 08:15:15 -0400

From: Robert L Krawitz 

Sender: owner-epson-inkjet@leben.com

Subject: How softweave works on Epson ESCP/2 Raster printers

Reply-to: epson-inkjet@leben.com

To: epson-inkjet@leben.com



A lot of people asked for this information, so I'm posting it to the

list.  Enjoy.





The Epson Stylus Color/Photo printers don't have memory to print

using all of the nozzles in the print head.  For example, the Stylus Photo

700/EX has 32 nozzles.  At 720 dpi, with an 8" wide image, a single line

requires (8 * 720 * 6 / 8) bytes, or 4320 bytes (because the Stylus Photo

printers have 6 ink colors).  To use 32 nozzles would require 138240 bytes.

It's actually worse than that, though, because the nozzles are spaced 8

rows apart.  Therefore, in order to store enough data to permit sending the

page as a simple raster, the printer would require enough memory to store

256 rows, or 1105920 bytes.  Considering that the Photo EX can print

11" wide, we're looking at more like 1.5 MB.  In fact, these printers are

capable of 1440 dpi horizontal resolution.  This would require 3 MB.  The

printers actually have 64K-256K.



With the newer (740/750 and later) printers it's even worse, since these

printers support multiple dot sizes.  But that's neither here nor there.



Older Epson printers had a mode called MicroWeave (tm).  In this mode, the

host fed the printer individual rows of dots, and the printer bundled them

up and sent them to the print head in the correct order to achieve high

quality.  This MicroWeave mode still works in new printers, but the

implementation is very minimal: the printer uses exactly one nozzle of

each color (the first one).  This makes printing extremely slow (more than

30 minutes for one 8.5x11" page), although the quality is extremely high

with no visible banding whatsoever.  It's not good for the print head,

though, since no ink is flowing through the other nozzles.  This leads to

drying of ink and possible permanent damage to the print head.



By the way, although the Epson manual says that microweave mode should be

used at 720 dpi, 360 dpi continues to work in much the same way.  At 360

dpi, data is fed to the printer one row at a time on all Epson printers.

The pattern that the printer uses to print is very prone to banding.

However, 360 dpi is inherently a low quality mode; if you're using it,

presumably you don't much care about quality.



Printers from roughly the Stylus Color 600 and later do not have the

capability to do MicroWeave correctly.  Instead, the host must arrange

the output in the order that it will be sent to the print head.  This

is a very complex process; the jets in the print head are spaced more

than one row (1/720") apart, so we can't simply send consecutive rows

of dots to the printer.  Instead, we have to pass e. g. the first, ninth,

17th, 25th... rows in order for them to print in the correct position on

the paper.  This interleaving process is called "soft" weaving.



This decision was probably made to save money on memory in the printer.

It certainly makes the driver code far more complicated than it would

be if the printer could arrange the output.  Is that a bad thing?

Usually this takes far less CPU time than the dithering process, and it

does allow us more control over the printing process, e. g. to reduce

banding.  Conceivably, we could even use this ability to map out bad

jets.



What makes this interesting is that there are many different ways of

of accomplishing this goal.  The naive way would be to divide the image

up into groups of 256 rows, and print all the mod8=0 rows in the first pass,

mod8=1 rows in the second, and so forth.  The problem with this approach

is that the individual ink jets are not perfectly uniform; some emit

slightly bigger or smaller drops than others.  Since each group of 8

adjacent rows is printed with the same nozzle, that means that there will

be distinct streaks of lighter and darker bands within the image (8 rows

is 1/90", which is visible; 1/720" is not).  Possibly worse is that these

patterns will repeat every 256 rows.  This creates banding patterns that

are about 1/3" wide.



So we have to do something to break up this patterning.



Epson does not publish the weaving algorithms that they use in their

bundled drivers.  Indeed, their developer web site

(http://www.ercipd.com/isv/edr_docs.htm) does not even describe how to

do this weaving at all; it says that the only way to achieve 720 dpi

is to use MicroWeave.  It does note (correctly) that 1440 dpi horizontal

can only be achieved by the driver (i. e. in software).  The manual

actually makes it fairly clear how to do this (it requires two passes

with horizontal head movement between passes), and it is presumably

possible to do this with MicroWeave.



The information about how to do this is apparently available under NDA.

It's actually easy enough to reverse engineer what's inside a print file

with a simple Perl script.  There are presumably other printer commands

that are not documented and may not be as easy to reverse engineer.



I considered a few algorithms to perform the weave.  The first one I

devised let me use only (jets - distance_between_jets + 1) nozzles, or

25.  This is OK in principle, but it's slower than using all nozzles.

By playing around with it some more, I came up with an algorithm that

lets me use all of the nozzles, except near the top and bottom of the

page.



This still produces some banding, though.  Even better quality can be

achieved by using multiple nozzles on the same line.  How do we do this?

In 1440x720 mode, we're printing two output lines at the same vertical

position.  However, if we want four passes, we have to effectively print

each line twice.  Actually doing this would increase the density, so

what we do is print half the dots on each pass.  This produces near-perfect

output, and it's far faster than using (pseudo) "MicroWeave".



The current algorithm is not completely general.  The number of passes

is limited to (nozzles / gap).  On the Photo EX class printers, that limits

it to 4 -- 32 nozzles, an inter-nozzle gap of 8 lines.  Furthermore, there

are a number of routines that are only coded up to 8 passes.  Fortunately,

this is enough passes to get rid of most banding.  What's left is a very

fine pattern that is sometimes described as "corduroy", since the pattern

looks like that kind of fabric.



Newer printers (those that support variable dot sizes, such as the 740,

1200, etc.) have an additional complication: when used in softweave mode,

they operate at 360 dpi horizontal resolution.  This requires FOUR passes

to achieve 1440x720 dpi.  Thus, to enable us to break up each row

into separate sub-rows, we have to actually print each row eight times.

Fortunately, all such printers have 48 nozzles and a gap of 6 rows,

except for the high-speed 900, which uses 96 nozzles and a gap of 2 rows.



I cannot let this entirely pass without commenting on the Stylus Color 440.

This is a very low-end printer with 21 (!) nozzles and a separation of 8.

The weave routine works correctly with single-pass printing, which is enough

to minimally achieve 720 dpi output (it's physically a 720 dpi printer).

However, the routine does not work correctly at more than one pass per row.

Therefore, this printer bands badly.



Yet another complication is how to get near the top and bottom of the page.

This algorithm lets us print to within one head width of the top of the

page, and a bit more than one head width from the bottom.  That leaves a

lot of blank space.  Doing the weave properly outside of this region is

increasingly difficult as we get closer to the edge of the paper; in the

interior region, any nozzle can print any line, but near the top and

bottom edges, only some nozzles can print.  We've handled this for now by

using the naive way mentioned above near the borders, and switching over

to the high quality method in the interior.  Unfortunately, this means

that the quality is quite visibly degraded near the top and bottom of the

page.  Algorithms that degrade more gracefully are more complicated.

Epson does not advertise that the printers can print at the very top of the

page, although in practice most or all of them can.  I suspect that the

quality that can be achieved very close to the top is poor enough that

Epson does not want to allow printing there.  That is a valid decision,

although we have taken another approach.



To compute the weave information, we need to start with the following

information:



1) The number of jets the print head has for each color;



2) The separation in rows between the jets;



3) The horizontal resolution of the printer;



4) The desired horizontal resolution of the output;



5) The desired extra passes to reduce banding.



As discussed above, each row is actually printed in one or more passes

of the print head; we refer to these as subpasses.  For example, if we're

printing at 1440(h)x720(v) on a printer with true horizontal resolution of

360 dpi, and we wish to print each line twice with different nozzles

to reduce banding, we need to use 8 subpasses.  The dither routine

will feed us a complete row of bits for each color; we have to split that

up, first by round robining the bits to ensure that they get printed at

the right micro-position, and then to split up the bits that are actually

turned on into two equal chunks to reduce banding.



Given the above information, and the desired row index and subpass (which

together form a line number), we can compute:



1) Which pass this line belongs to.  Passes are numbered consecutively,

   and each pass must logically (see #3 below) start at no smaller a row

   number than the previous pass, as the printer cannot advance by a

   negative amount.



2) Which jet will print this line.



3) The "logical" first line of this pass.  That is, what line would be

   printed by jet 0 in this pass.  This number may be less than zero.

   If it is, there are ghost lines that don't actually contain any data.

   The difference between the logical first line of this pass and the

   logical first line of the preceding pass tells us how many lines must

   be advanced.



4) The "physical" first line of this pass.  That is, the first line index

   that is actually printed in this pass.  This information lets us know

   when we must prepare this pass.



5) The last line of this pass.  This lets us know when we must actually

   send this pass to the printer.



6) The number of ghost rows this pass contains.  We must still send the

   ghost data to the printer, so this lets us know how much data we must

   fill in prior to the start of the pass.

Epson ESCP/2 Commands

This is a description of the ESCP/2 raster commands used by the

gimp-print plugin and Ghostscript driver, which is a subset of the

complete command set. The full documents are found on

 Note that these are NOT

always correct, and are certainly not complete.



All ESCP/2 raster commands begin with the ESC character (1b hex),

followed by either one or two command characters and arguments where

applicable. Older commands generally have one command character.

Newer commands usually have a '(' (left parenthesis) followed by a

command character and a byte count for the arguments that follow. The

byte count is a 16-bit (2 byte) binary integer, in little endian

order.



All arguments listed here are of the form "name[bytes]" where [bytes]

is the number of bytes that comprise the argument. The arguments

themselves are usually one, two, or four byte integers, always little

endian (the least significant bits come first). Presumably this is to

match Intel processors.



In some cases, the same command sequence identifies different versions

of the same command, depending upon the number of bytes of arguments.



ESC @

Reset the printer. Discards any output, ejects the existing

page, returns all settings to their default. Always use this

before printing a page.



ESC (G BC=1 ON1

Turn on graphics mode. ON should be 1 (turn on graphics

mode).



ESC (U BC=1 UNIT1

Set basic unit of measurement used by printer. This is

expressed in multiples of 1/3600". At 720 DPI, UNIT is 5; at

360 DPI, UNIT is 10.



ESC (U BC=5 PAGEUNITS1 VUNIT1 HUNIT1 BASEUNIT2

Set basic units of measurement used by the printer. PAGEUNIT

is the unit of page measurement (for commands that set page

dimensions and the like). VUNIT is the unit of vertical

measurement (for vertical movement commands). HUNIT is the

unit of horizontal movement (for horizontal positioning

commands). All of these units are expressed in BASEUNIT,

which is in reciprocal inches. Typically, BASEUNIT is 1440.

In 720 DPI mode, PAGEUNIT, VUNIT, and HUNIT are all 2; in

1440x720 DPI mode, PAGEUNIT and VUNIT are normally set to 2;

HUNIT is set to 1.



ESC (K BC=2 ZERO1 GRAYMODE1

Set color or grayscale mode, on printers supporting an

explicit grayscale mode. These printers can be identified

because they are advertised as having more black nozzles than

nozzles of individual colors. Setting grayscale mode allows

use of these extra nozzles for faster printing. GRAYMODE

should be 0 or 2 for color, 1 for grayscale. ZERO should

always be 0.



ESC (i BC=1 MICROWEAVE1

If MICROWEAVE is 1, use microweave mode. On older printers,

this is used to turn on microweave; on newer printers, it

prints one row at a time. All printers support this mode. It

should only be used at 720 (or 1440x720) DPI. The Epson

Stylus Pro series indicates additional modes: 2= Full-overlap,

3= four-pass, 4="Full-overlap 2". Any of these commands can

be used with the high four bits set to either 3 or 0.



ESC U DIRECTION1

If DIRECTION is 1, print unidirectionally; if 0, print

bidirectionally.



ESC (s BC=1 SPEED1

On some older printers, this controls the print head speed.

SPEED of 2 is 10 inches/sec; SPEED of 0 or 1 is 20.



ESC (e BC=2 ZERO1 DOTSIZE1

Choose print dotsize. DOTSIZE can take on various values,

depending upon the printer. Almost all printers support 0 and

2. Variable dot size printers allow a value of 16. Other

than the value of 16, this appears to be ignored at

resolutions of 720 DPI and above.



ESC (C BC=2 PAGELENGTH2

ESC (C BC=4 PAGELENGTH4

Set the length of the page in "pageunits" (see ESC (U above).

The second form of the command allows setting of longer page

lengths on new printers (these happen to be the printers that

support variable dot size).



ESC (c BC=4 TOP2 LENGTH2

ESC (c BC=8 TOP4 LENGTH4

Set the vertical page margins of the page in "pageunits" (see

ESC (U above). The margins are specified as the top of the

page and the length of the page. The second form of the

command allows setting of longer page lengths on new printers

(these happen to be the printers that support variable dot

size).



ESC (S BC=8 WIDTH4 LENGTH4

Set the width and length of the printed page region in

"pageunits" (see ESC (U above).



ESC (v BC=2 ADVANCE2

ESC (v BC=4 ADVANCE4

Feed vertically ADVANCE "vertical units" (see ESC (U above)

from the current print head position.



ESC (V BC=2 ADVANCE2

ESC (V BC=4 ADVANCE4

Feed vertically ADVANCE "vertical units" (see ESC (U above)

from the top margin.



ESC ($ BC=4 OFFSET4

Set horizontal position to OFFSET from the left margin. This

command operates on printers of the 740 class and newer (all

printers with variable dot size).



ESC $ OFFSET2

Set horizontal position to OFFSET from the left margin. This

command operates on printers of the 740 class and newer (all

printers with variable dot size).



ESC (\ BC=4 UNITS2 OFFSET2

Set horizontal position to OFFSET from the previous print head

position, measured in UNITS. UNITS is measured in inverse

inches, and should be set to 1440 in all cases. This operates

on all 1440 dpi printers that do not support variable dot size.



ESC (/ BC=4 OFFSET4

Set horizontal position to OFFSET from the previous print head

position, measured in "horizontal units" (see ESC (U above).

This operates on all variable dot size printers.



ESC \ OFFSET2

Set horizontal position to OFFSET from the previous print head

position, measured in basic unit of measurement (see ESC (U

above). This is used on all 720 dpi printers, and can also be

used on 1440 dpi printers in lower resolutions to save a few

bytes. Note that OFFSET may be negative. The range of values

for this command is between -16384 and 16383.



ESC r COLOR1

ESC (r BC=2 DENSITY1 COLOR1

Set the ink color. The first form is used on four-color

printers; the second on six-color printers. DENSITY is 0 for

dark inks, 1 for light. COLOR is 0=black, 1=magenta, 2=cyan,

4=yellow. This command is not used on variable dot size

printers in softweave mode.



ESC . COMPRESS1 VSEP1 HSEP1 LINES1 WIDTH2 data...

Print data. COMPRESS signifies the compression mode: 0=no

compression, 1=TIFF compression (incorrectly documented as

"run length encoded"), 2=TIFF compression with a special

command set. VSEP depends upon resolution and printer type.

At 360 DPI, it is always 10. At 720 DPI, it is normally 5.

On the ESC 600, it is 40 (8 * 5). On some other printers, it

varies. HSEP1 is 10 at 360 DPI and 5 at 720 or 1440 DPI (1440

DPI cannot be printed in one pass; it is printed in two

passes, with the dots separated in each pass by 1/720").

LINES is the number of lines to be printed. It should be 1 in

microweave and 360 DPI. At 720 DPI softweave, it should be

the number of lines to be actually printed. WIDTH is the

number of pixels to be printed in each row. Following this

command, a carriage return (13 decimal, 0A hex) should be

output to return the print head position to the left margin.



The basic data format is a string of bytes, with data from

left to right on the page. Within each byte, the highest bit

is first.



The TIFF compression is implemented as one count byte followed

by one or more data bytes. There are two cases:



1) If the count byte is 128 or less, it is followed by [count]

+ 1 data bytes. So if the count byte is 0, it is followed

by 1 data byte; if it is 128, it is followed by 129 data

bytes.



2) If the count byte is greater than 128, it is followed by

one byte. This byte is repeated (257 - [count]) times. So

if [count] is 129, the next byte is treated as though it

were repeated 128 times; if [count] is 255, it is treated

as though it were repeated twice.



ESC i COLOR1 COMPRESS1 BITS1 BYTES2 LINES2 data...

Print data in the newer printers (that support variable dot

size), and Stylus Pro models. COLOR is the color: 0=black,

1=magenta, 2=cyan, 4=yellow, 17=light magenta, 18=light cyan.

COMPRESS signifies the compression mode: 0=no compression,

1=TIFF compression (incorrectly documented as "run length

encoded"), 2=TIFF compression with a special command set.

BITS is the number of bits per pixel. BYTES is the number of

bytes wide for each row (ceiling(BITS * width_of_row, 8)) --

note that this is different from the ESC. command above.

LINES is the number of lines to be printed. This command is

the only way to get variable dot size printing. In variable

dot mode, the size of the dots increases as the value (1, 2,

or 3) increases.



ESC (D BC=4 BASE2 VERTICAL1 HORIZONTAL1

Set printer horizontal and vertical spacing. It only applies

to variable dot size printers in softweave mode (and possibly

other high end printers). BASE is the base unit for this

command; it must be 14400. VERTICAL is the distance in these

units between printed rows; it should be

(separation_in_nozzles * BASE / 720). HORIZONTAL is the

horizontal separation between dots in a row. Depending upon

the printer, this should be either (14400 / 720) or (14400 /

360). The Stylus Pro 9000 manual suggests that the settings

should match the chosen resolution, but that is apparently not

the case (or not always the case) on other printers.



ESC (R BC=8 00 R E M O T E 1

Enters "remote mode". This is a special, undocumented command set

that is used to set up various printer options, such as paper feed

tray, and perform utility functions such as head cleaning and

alignment. It does not appear that anything here is actually

required to make the printer print. Our best understanding of

what is in a remote command sequence is described in a separate

section below.



ESC 01 @EJL [sp] ID\r\n

Return the printer ID. This is considered a remote mode

command, although the syntax is that of a conventional

command. This returns the following information:



@EJL ID\r

MFG:EPSON;

CMD:ESCPL2,BDC;

MDL:[printer model];

CLS:PRINTER;

DES:EPSON [printer model];

\f



After all data has been sent, a form feed byte should be sent.



All newer Epson printers (STC 440, STP 750) require the following

command to be sent at least once to enable printing at all. This

command specifically takes the printer out of the Epson packet mode

communication protocol (whatever that is) and enables normal data

transfer. Sending it multiple times is is not harmful, so it is

normally sent at the beginning of each job:



ESC 01 @EJL[space]1284.4[newline]@EJL[space][space][space][space][space][newline]ESC@







The proper sequence of initialization commands is:



magic command

ESC @

remote mode if needed

ESC (G

ESC (U

ESC (K (if appropriate)

ESC (i

ESC U (if needed)

ESC (s (if appropriate)

ESC (e

ESC (C

ESC (c

ESC (S

ESC (D (if needed)

ESC (V (optional -- this can be accomplished with ESC (v)



For printing, the proper sequence is:



ESC (v



repeat for each color:

ESC ($ or ESC (\ or ESC \

ESC (r or ESC r (if needed -- not used with ESC i and not needed if

the color has not changed from the previous printed line)

ESC . or ESC i ...data... [return] (0A hex)



To terminate a page:



[formfeed] (0C hex)

ESC @





Remote Mode Commands

====================



The following description of remote commands comes out of an

examination of the sequences used by the printer utilities bundled

with the Windows drivers for the ESC740, and from other sources (some

Epson manuals, experimentation, analysis of print files). It is

largely speculative as these commands are not all documented in the

Epson documentation we have access to. Generally, newer manuals

provide more thorough documentation.



Remote command mode is entered when the printer is sent the following

sequence:



ESC (R BC=8 00 R E M O