Printing problem with Epson 9800, G5/10.3, PS CS2

[QT Luong]

I am having a sudden printing problem on my epson 9800, printing from a Powermac Dual 2Ghz powerpc G5 running mac os 10.3, and Photoshop CS2.

Less than one month ago, I have printed a 741MB file. Today, I just printed a smaller file of about 450MB. Then I tried immediately afterwards to reprint the 741MB file. The window "Print" "printing page: 1" appears, there is high CPU use, but then nothing happens. The "9800 USB" window never shows up. Eventually after ten minutes of waiting I have to "force quit" photoshop as it shows "Hung" in the Activity monitor.

The only other open applications are Epson printer utility (reports OK status) and Firefox. I've tried to reboot both computer and printer, to change the memory allocation in PS CS2, even to print using PS CS, with the same non-results. On the other hand, I can send a small file (90MB) to the printer and there is no problem.

Any ideas about what could have gone suddenly wrong ?


If the computer sounds old, it is because I have dedicated it solely to driving the printer, as I knew it worked, that is until today (I've read since that there were serious color management issues with newer software). The only issue was that I had to reduce the memory allocation to about 500MB/750MB in Photoshop, otherwise I sometimes get an error message for large file. That had been discussed previously in the forum.

[mandoman7]

Someone suggested to me that I should keep at least 1/3 of my main hard drive available and I've found it to be true for my mac. Even with enough ram and technically enough hard drive space available, I was still getting major stalling in photoshop and firefox when the main hard drive was 80% full. Clearing out the main hard drive as much as possible helped my problem.

[bdkphoto]

I would do a disk permissions repair of the hard drive; Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility, select the hard drive>repair permissions.

You can also zap the PRAM on start up,-- I think you hold down Command+Option+P+R keys on start up and wait for 3 chimes, it will reset perimeter RAM to default settings. Double check this routine online, I'm posting from memory...

Check your USB connections as well.

If you have an external or second HD with available space, copy files for printing to it and see if you can print from there. If your main drive is near full (see Mandoman's post) , or there are problems with the main drive, this may help.

[Peter Mounier]

I haven't printed a large file on any Epson printers in awhile, but I recall having a similar problem in the past. Curiously, I think clearing the "completed jobs" list made things better, and I was able to resume printing. I'm not sure there's any good logic to that, but it seemed to help.

Peter

[tgtaylor]

You can also change/set the memory/space that is allocated to PS to work with.

Looks like you already did that.

[QT Luong]

Thanks for the suggestions, so far no success.

The boot drive was 160GB with about 10GB left. I cleaned it some, to make 15 additional GB. I ran repair permissions. I then cloned that drive to a different 250GB drive (which has therefore more than 100GB free), and booted from that 250GB drive instead.This seems to rule out the HDD as the source of the problem.

Tried 500, 750, and 1000GB allocations, though in the past memory allocation problems didn't result in PS hanging, but instead an error message like "could not print because of program error".

I am still able to make smaller prints, so this isn't a USB connection problem.

Peter, you mentioned the "completed jobs" list. Where is that found ?

[Peter Mounier]

If I recall correctly, there's a 30,000 pixel limit (in any one direction) for printing from and Epson 9800 and CS2?. Have you gone past that?

Here's a thread from this forum regarding that issue...
http://www.largeformatphotography.info/forum/showthread.php?t=18597

The "Completed jobs" list is in the printer driver. See attached...

[bdkphoto]

Thanks for the suggestions, so far no success.

The boot drive was 160GB with about 10GB left. I cleaned it some, to make 15 additional GB. I ran repair permissions. I then cloned that drive to a different 250GB drive (which has therefore more than 100GB free), and booted from that 250GB drive instead.This seems to rule out the HDD as the source of the problem.

Tried 500, 750, and 1000GB allocations, though in the past memory allocation problems didn't result in PS hanging, but instead an error message like "could not print because of program error".

I am still able to make smaller prints, so this isn't a USB connection problem.

Peter, you mentioned the "completed jobs" list. Where is that found ?



Have a look at your scratch disk set up. You should have a separate disk set up with plenty of defragmented space (separate drive from the Applications and from the data) for your scratch disk.

[Andre Noble]

I am having a sudden printing problem on my epson 9800

Don't! :)

[Keith S. Walklet]

QT, whenever I've encountered that issue, it has always been due to insufficient headroom on the computer to spool the image. I drive my 9800 with a laptop, and as a result of running into this issue, keep all my data on an external drive so the laptop has a relatively clear hard drive.

Secondly, the mention of clearing the print driver Peter mentions is usually necessary anytime the system hangs. Jobs that don't print seem to get hung up there and get in the way of jobs that are waiting to print.

So, plenty of headroom and clear the jobs list in the print driver is what gets mine going again.