For my final trick this week, I’ll give network printing a try. I’m on the porch, and I want a direct network connection from my Snapdragon/Windows 11 laptop to the Epson ET-2985 downstairs in the office. Without it being a shared device within the Windows laptop that has a USB connection to the printer.
That seemed to work. Is the printer available within the free imaging software I like to use?
Yes it is! Now I’ll scurry down to the office and see if the picture printed.
It did. Success!
I could never deny being an obsessive fiddler with settings. I’m playing with every possible way of adjusting the Epson scanner. The automatic setting does some things almost as well as the Canon did.
The processing on this scan is bright and de-screened, while effectively reducing the yellowing of the paper. The problem is a sharpening filter was added, and I really dislike that.
Enlarge this image and you can see there are ridges around everything, including the lettering. If I could disable that, I’d be pleased with this quality. Yeah, I know. Picky, picky, picky.
This is how it looks with only de-screening.
Here’s another insufferable explanation of further technical curiosity. I continue to run on the Verizon-supplied G3100 Wi-Fi router for gigabit internet service. Despite my concerns about security, I like being able to check on it from my phone.
Which I did yesterday, when the Epson ET-2985 unexpectedly spit out a piece of paper. Telling the printer in a commanding voice, “Eat your own output!” I have scanned the page.
Signal strength fair? Uh, the router and the printer are only six feet apart in the home office. Pulling out my phone and running the Verizon Home app, I saw the Epson printer was on the 2.4 GHz network. My best guess was the router, which is set to automatically move devices between Wi-Fi channels, must have kicked it off the 5 GHz network for some reason.
As I was looking at that, the app suddenly said the router was offine. Yikes. Yeah, it bounces itself every so often. That’s another complaint I have. I’ve seen error messages in the router’s log in the past that had me chasing down a possible bug in the firmware, but this time I didn’t see the error.
The time was near midnight, so maybe Verizon was running a maintenance routine. What’s interesting to me was the way the printer provided a warning of router trouble.
After everything had settled down, the router’s Wi-Fi signal strength was, as expected, excellent. But note that the printer’s DHCP-assigned IP address changed from .213 to .253. Renewal of .213 must have failed for some reason, or perhaps it wasn’t attempted. I’ll see what I can find in the router’s DHCP log.
Loki, Thor’s wily half-brother nemesis, sabotaged the new printer. Less than a day after setting it up, there was striping.
A test print revealed a problem in the blue nozzle. I ran the nozzle cleaning maintenance process on the printer, thereby defeating the Norse god of mischief.
I can’t imagine being able to control the scanner from my phone is an option I’ll need often, but it’s nice to have.
This is a painting I bought from Colleen a long time ago. That’s Kovar, a character in her graphic novel series, ‘A Distant Soil’.
Here’s how the scan looks after a bit of tweaking that I wouldn’t have bothered doing with the old scanner. The adjustment overdoes the lighting a bit.
The blog has outlasted my Canon all-in-one inkjet printer. The printhead, that was never changed, has died.
The error says it’s the wrong printhead, but it’s a dead head. I’ll spare telling you everything I tried, both official from Canon and unofficial from users.
What gets me is the error prevents scanning, and I could live with it for now as just a scanner. My Samsung ML-1710 laser printer, that’s even older than the Canon, continues to chug along, and I have a spare toner cartridge for it.
Duplex printing is a must for a replacement. Consumer Reports had me leaning in the direction of getting an Epson EcoTank. This expertly produced video clinched it.
The least expensive model, the ET-2980, is good enough for my purposes. I’ll get the ET-2985 variation that comes with an extra bottle of black ink and costs ten bucks less at BJ’s than the ET-2980 does at Best Buy.
This was the final scan I made on the Canon MP600.
