It took forty-five minutes. During the update, Arthur’s cat stepped on the power strip. The printer went dark. Arthur’s soul left his body. But by some miracle, the P9000 had a dual-boot firmware backup. It recovered. When the light turned steady green, Arthur exhaled.
He ran a nozzle check. The print came out. Half the nozzles in the light magenta channel were missing. He ran a cleaning cycle. Ten minutes. Another nozzle check. Worse. He ran a "Power Cleaning." The printer groaned. It consumed ink like a sailor drinks rum—$80 worth of ink in sixty seconds. The waste ink pad counter filled up. A warning appeared: "Maintenance Box Expired." epson photo printer software
A week of perfect prints followed. Then, a band. A thin, hairline white stripe across every print. It took forty-five minutes
Arthur Pendelton was a man who believed in the sanctity of the analog. He was a wet-plate collodion photographer, a dying breed who mixed his own chemicals and polished silver nitrate onto glass plates in the dark. Yet, on a crisp Tuesday in October, he found himself kneeling before a black monolith: the Epson SureColor P9000. Arthur’s soul left his body
Epson provides ICC profiles. They are hidden on a support page that requires you to enter your printer’s serial number, your operating system version, and the phase of the moon. Arthur downloaded "P9000_Hahnemuehle_PhotoRag_Baryta_2023.icc." He placed it in /Library/ColorSync/Profiles . He restarted.
He had forgotten the ICC profile.
He rebooted. The printer whirred to life. Then, the dialog box appeared.