Just converted a Epson...
Thought this might be of interest, I just converted a Epson Stylus Photo over to EcoSolvent, it was a bit of a mission and took a lot of mucking around to get it printing right, but it is all up and working now and apart from its slow speed its working great for the small sticker runs I use it for.
I got a CIS kit that was suitable for both EcoSolvent and inks from Aomya in China. Fitting was easy enough, just had to make sure the printer was thoroughly cleaned first from old ink, used the Aomya cleaning fluid for that.
For test media I used Orajet 3551RA. Initial tests were pretty disappointing, the printer was laying down far too much ink far too quickly and it was running and pooling in the little pores in the RapidAir vinyl and would smudge as it came out the printer. Also tried preheating the media and a hair-dryer to dry but it smudged the ink even more.
Did some more research and figured I needed to control two more things to try and reign this in, slow the printer down and control the ink density, something the standard driver does not allow.
Did some digging and managed to drag up some old RIP software, AcroRIP, although it was a dead end on my Windows 8 machine, but did run OK in a Windows XP Virtual Machine.
The RIP gave me better results, especially by lowering ink density to around 25%, but it was still pooling and not drying quickly enough. Had a chat with the local supplies shop about media and he emphasised that I need the ink to dry quicker and their machines all run heaters to ensure that, also suggested trying the non Rapid Air media.
Initial tests with the new media were not any better, the ink just pooled more randomly, hair-dryer didn't help either. Began investigating putting a small heating strip under the where the print head runs when I have another idea.
So far I had been running everything a
relatively low resolution as it was all just test prints, so I bumped up the resolution to max (5760x2880) to see what happened, brilliant move the printer slowed right down and laid the ink down differently in much smaller drops, the result only minor ink run and a much better result.
I thought what would some heat do here so grabbed my trusty hair-dryer and ran the test again, result, perfect it worked
So the set-up is now with two cheap hair-dryers that gets the print area and media up around mid 40s degC, been running every evening now for a week with no issues.
So it is possible but prepare to have to muck around a bit. Some tweaking still required, colour accuracy is a bit out and I suspect I could get away with lowering ink density a bit more and maybe lowering the resolution to speed up the printer, so far 2880x2880 is OK.
