Washed out colors with borderless printing.

[thehomesteadfarmpnw]

I am printing from Adobe Illustrator onto Epson Premium Presentation Paper Matte with an Epson Ecotank 3850. I forgot to check borderless on my first print so second go round, I checked borderless and checked "do not scale" and "retain size", all the applicable settings. I have a 0.25" bleed set up with image expanded to the bleed. It printed to the edge, however my colors are all blown out and faded and gone is the crisp edges of the lettering which now has a faint "glow" around the edges.. I have searched and searched and all I can find is "it just automatically stretches the image when printing borderless" but I just don't want to accept that. I feel like there must be a setting either on the AI side or printer side that I am missing and the setting I chose is getting overidden? The ONLY things I changed between print 1 and print 2 was checking "borderless" and choosing "retain size" in the Settings>Expansion box (therefore unchecking auto expand) within the printer dialog box and checking "do not scale" on the AI print dialog box. Please tell me there's a way! I am nerding out over this and it's driving me nuts.

[creative explorer]

@thehomesteadfarmpnw I have an Epson Workforce, 7840 and when I send prints to print, I always make sure I change the settings to 'Fine' printing and not on 'draft' mode because it uses less ink on 'draft mode' and I want full color. Also, check to see the ink supply as well. I sometimes run of ink without even realizing it until it stops printing and then I realize that magneta is out, and maybe three pags in black is fine until it tries to print a colour image! When I need to print a photo on matte photo paper, check that "Premium Presentation Paper Matte" is still selected. 

[thehomesteadfarmpnw]

Thanks for your reply!

All of my paper settings (on printer itself, within Adobe Illustrator print settings and printer program settings) were set to "Premium Presentation paper matte". I had just filled all my ink tanks two days before printing and I was printing on the highest quality in the print settings (as shown in attcahed photos).

Basically, it is stretching my image even though I am asking it not to in the settings. However it is being  stretched or altered is causing the colors to lose clarity and depth. Not only that, something is happening to my vector text making it have a pinkish "glow" rather than crisp black text like when I print without the borderless setting changed. The image is high resolution. I even did a test print on a full size sheet of Ultra Premium Matte at 8x11 and it looked great. I even tried choosing the "auto-expand" setting in the expansions dialog box (vs. "retain size") and "do not scale" in the AI print diaglog box to see if I allowed it to expand or stretch the image on it's own if it would retain the color quality. It did not. It actually looked identical.

Needless to say, I have three sheets of matte paper left and about 30 exta copies of the cover to our Holiday Christmas Magazine just trying to figure this out! There has to be an answer. I am committed.

[creative explorer]

@thehomesteadfarmpnw I probably wouldn't have done the 'auto-expand' especially if you have a bleed 0.25" set up. In the Epson Expansion settings, I would keep Retain Size, but in the Illustrator Print Dialog, I would make sure the media size is set exactly to the paper size (e.g., Letter) and that the Placement is centered. (a little confused when you wrote: I even did a test print on a full size sheet of Ultra Premium Matte at 8x11 and it looked great. I even tried choosing the "auto-expand" setting in the expansions dialog box (vs. "retain size") and "do not scale" in the AI print diaglog box to see if I allowed it to expand or stretch the image on it's own if it would retain the color quality. It did not. It actually looked identical. So, if it looked fine and looked identical go with that then?

If there is blurriness with the text, mak sure the text is 100% black.It sounds like the borderless setting is changing it to "Composite Black" (using all colors), which likely causes the blurriness. I would always 'overprint black' checked because this will prevent mis-registration issues, aiding in the sharp, clean edges and avoids unsightly white gaps or "the halos!"

Test on regular paper but, on a high fin printing (or buy more paper!). Always test on regular paper first.