Epson inkjet printers: Solving paper feed problems

If paper doesn’t feed through your Epson printer, look out for the following:

Leading edge problems. If there’s anything wrong with the leading edge of the paper (the edge that goes in first), the printer may not be able to load it. Check for creases, folds, tears, or other damage. Proper loading depends on the leading edge being perfectly even, so that it goes straight into the rollers. If the leading edge is damaged, try turning the paper around and loading the edge on the opposite side instead. If for some reason that’s not practical, do your best to smooth out the edge. This problem is more likely to happen with paper that was reused or damaged.

Paper curl. If the paper curls the wrong way (outward compared to the rollers), the printer rollers might not be able to grab it. Remove the paper and see if it has a curl at the edge. If it’s printable on both sides you can try printing on the other side so that the curl goes the other way. If it’s coated on only one side, you’ll have to carefully try to de-curl it. If it’s expensive fine-art paper, use great care to avoid creasing it or leaving fingerprints when you try to remove the curl. The expensive solution is to use a deroller; this is typically used by people who buy paper in rolls since those tend to make the curl quite persistent.

Friction with other sheets. If you’re loading multiple sheets at a time, the frontmost sheet might not drop into the rollers if it sticks a little to the next sheet in the stack. Try jostling and fanning the paper stack to loosen them up. This is more of a problem with papers with some types of coatings and textures.

Dirty rollers. House dust or dust from matte or rough fine art papers can build up on the rubber rollers, reducing their grip and making it harder for them to grab the paper. If a cleaning sheet is available for your printer you can try that. If you don’t have a cleaning sheet, try picking up the dust off the rollers by pressing a piece of moderately sticky paper on them. (Don’t use something that’s so sticky it might ruin the rollers, like packing tape, address labels, or duct tape.)

If the printer continues to have trouble grabbing the paper, as the print job starts try holding the paper and give it a slight nudge in as it loads.

Narrow paper. On the Epson Stylus Pro 3800, the manual feed slot doesn’t like paper that’s much narrower than a US Letter sheet. You’ll have to feed it through the automatic feeder. But the automatic feeder may have trouble with paper smaller than 4 x 6 inches; you may have to keep it straight with your hands as it drops into the slot.

Black area of paper. On the Epson Stylus Pro 3800, there’s an odd issue where the Epson 3800 may not sense the paper correctly if part of the paper is already covered with black. Read about that in this article: Epson 3800 error: Incorrect paper size or Paper error.

I’ve only used Epson printers, but those tips may also apply to other brands of inkjet printers.

Epson 3800 error: Incorrect paper size or Paper error

A friend of mine was printing on an Epson Stylus Pro 3800, and as the paper tried to load the printer displayed an “Incorrect paper size” error even though the size of the photo paper matched the Paper Size selected in Page Setup. And it worked just a few minutes earlier.

My friend was trying to print multiple images on a sheet, in multiple passes. As a troubleshooting step, I turned the paper around and inserted it the other way. It worked. Why would the printer accept the paper size one way but not the other?

I came up with a theory about it. Unlike my older Epson, the 3800 can perform automatic nozzle checks and head alignments, and can sense paper sizes. I have read that it can do all this because of an optical sensor built into the printer. Now, my friend was printing images with large areas of black near the edge, and she was printing borderless. I believe that when she loaded paper that had a large black area extending about halfway across the paper, the optical sensor saw all that black and decided that the paper’s edge didn’t actually begin until the white area appeared.

3800-paper-size-error

I have also run into a similar problem where the Epson 3800 will simply say “Paper error” and tells you to press the paper feed button and try again. In this case I am feeding an edge that is partially printed along the leading edge, though not completely black and with a thin empty border along the edge. Even then, the 3800 senses a misfeed even though there’s nothing physically wrong with the sheet. Inserting a blank sheet loads successfully.

This behavior indicates that the optical sensor is designed to think of paper as a broad expanse of empty white, and it may incorrectly believe that long dark areas are not paper and indicate a paper feed misalignment. If you’ve previously experimented with multiple-pass printing on another Epson printer model, you may not be able to make it work on Epson printers that try to sense blank sheets optically.

Some reading on the Web indicates that certain Epson models are able to turn off this automatic page size sensing, but that feature doesn’t seem to be available on the 3800.

Cannot read CD or DVD from Windows Vista

If you get a CD or DVD from a Windows user and it seems blank, or you can’t read it on your Mac (or non-Vista version of Windows), and the Windows user swears the disc was burned successfully, the Windows user probably burned it using the default settings in Windows Vista. With the default settings, the disc may not be readable on older versions of Windows, or on non-Windows systems such as Mac OS X and Linux. The files may actually be there on the disc, but they may not be visible on the unsupported system.

If you are working with a Windows user who knows how to re-burn the DVD with different settings, have them re-burn it using Mastered Format instead of the default Live File System. Mastered Format is more compatible with the rest of the computing world. (So why does Microsoft make Live File System the default in Vista? Apparently it has some useful features that make DVD burning a little more flexible than it is on other systems.)

An alternative to wasting another disc is to open the disc in a copy of Windows Vista or Windows XP running in virtualization on your Mac (such as in Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion) and then drag the files over to the Mac side. That’s ultimately what I decided to do; I was able to see the invisible files in my up-to-date version of Windows XP running under Parallels Desktop.

Or, if you happen to have a PC that you can reach over the network from your Mac, you could also try putting the DVD into the PC and grabbing it over the network from the Mac.

Update/note: I do not know if this issue with default burn settings also applies to Windows 7 or later. If you know, tell us in the comments!

Camera Raw: Detailed image inspection with one key

Camera Raw 4.1 and later add a very useful feature that appeared first in Lightroom. If you want to inspect an image closely for dust or other defects that need retouching, the Page Down key takes you through the entire image, from the top left corner to the bottom right corner. Here’s how it works:

1. In Camera Raw, zoom to 100% view or higher.
2. Press the Home key to view the top left corner of the image.
3. Press the Page Down key to move down one screen.
4. Press Page Down again to move down another screen. This is the cool part: If you hit the bottom of the image and press Page Down, Camera Raw automatically jumps to the top of the image one screen to the right! This means that all you have to do to check the entire image is keep pressing Page Down, until you reach the bottom right corner of the image.

On notebook computers without separate Home, End, Page Up, or Page Down keys, remember that they may be available as second functions on your arrow or other keys. For example, on Mac notebooks, these four functions are overlaid on the four arrow keys, and invoked when you also press the Fn (function) key. So to use Page Down, you’d press Fn+Down Arrow.

Open Raw files in Adobe Camera Raw by default

If you use Adobe Camera Raw as your raw converter for digital camera raw files, you might want to be able to open your raw files in Camera Raw when you double-click them. For most files, you would do this in your operating system by changing which application opens the camera raw file type.

But with Camera Raw, there’s a catch. Camera Raw is not a standalone application, so you can’t associate it directly with a file type. It turns out that this is not a big deal, because Adobe Photoshop must open camera raw files in Camera Raw anyway. So the solution is to associate camera raw files with Photoshop. I show the steps below for Mac OS X; the steps for Windows are similar.

1. On the desktop, select a raw file of the type you want to open in Photoshop. I’ve selected a CR2 file from a Canon digital SLR.

Select a raw file

2. Choose File > Get Info (Command+I).

Open the Get Info window

3. From the Open With pop-up menu in the Get Info window, choose the version of Photoshop that you want to use to open your raw files.

Assign Photoshop to the file type

4. The file icon updates to indicate that Photoshop will now open it.

Icon indicates new association

5. Click “Change All” so that your change applies to all files of the same type. Other file icons may not update immediately, but the change has taken effect. From now on, when you double-click that type of a raw file, it will open in Photoshop, which will then open it in Adobe Camera Raw.

Set this association as the default

Because the file association is tied to a specific file type, making this change affects only the file type you’ve changed. You’ll need to associate each different raw file type separately. For example, if you made this change for NEF (Nikon) raw files and then you later work with some CR2 (Canon) raw files, you’ll have to associate the CR2 files with Photoshop too.

(If you’re having trouble getting Camera Raw to see your raw files in the first place, try updating Camera Raw. Support for new cameras is added several times a year. Either download the latest version from adobe.com, or run the Adobe Updater utility that came with Photoshop. Note that the current version of Camera Raw may not work with older versions of Photoshop. If you are trying to edit a new camera’s raw files in a version of Photoshop that’s too old for the current version of Camera Raw, you should either upgrade Photoshop or use the free Adobe DNG converter to convert raw files to the DNG format, which older versions of Camera Raw can edit.)

Thanks to Céline C. for asking this question!