I bought a nice new HP Printer today, and a three-pack of Premium Plus Photo Paper. I opened up a pack, carefully loaded the paper (taking extra caution not to touch the surface) and picked a favorite photo to pick. I let it rest in the tray for a bit so the ink could dry, and I picked it up.
To my dismay, there were visible droplets of undried ink on the surface. Confused, I looked at the box, and noticed that it was satin-matt paper, and I knew I hadn’t set the gloss setting at all.
So, I went back to print the picture, and I was baffled by the fact that there was no way to change this setting. Obviously the difference in matte and glossy was causing a problem - there were droplets of ink!
So I just spent the last hour scouring the web to see if there was some updated driver that I needed that included this setting, to no avail. I read the instructions that came with the paper - nothing. I did notice that the instructions mentioned that you could get drivers for non-HP printers so that they could properly print out according to the requirements for HP papers. This distracted me for a moment - I have hundreds of dollars worth of Canon paper that might potentially go to waste if I can’t find a way to use it with my non-Canon printer. So I grabbed a pack of the Canon paper, and took out the instructions. Of course, they said nothing about similar drivers for their product. What the hell, I thought, I’ll put in a sheet and see how it prints anyway.
So I remove the sheet from the pack and notice that the wrong side of the sheet is slightly tacky to the touch…
:smack:
Did I say wrong side? I picked up the failed photo and looked at it again. I turned it over and noted that the texture on the unprinted side was much finer than the reverse. Yup, sure enough, all that careful “don’t touch the surface” loading neglected the most important thing: make sure the paper is the right way up!
D’oh.
Done anything totally idiotic lately?