My First Mug & Powerdriver Issues

[nik_decalarama]

Here's a pic of my first mug, well my second actually. The first one didn't come out 100% as I think the mug was too low in the press. Just got the new gxe3300n today and had to have a go right away but it was a nightmare to set up. Powerdriver will not work, Coreldraw keeps saying there is a driver issue and suggests removing and reinstalling (which I tried), so I ended up just using the Sawgrass ICC profile for the GXe3300n, and it worked a treat.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]1027[/ATTACH]

[bms]

Here's a pic of my first mug, well my second actually. The first one didn't come out 100% as I think the mug was too low in the press. Just got the new gxe3300n today and had to have a go right away but it was a nightmare to set up. Powerdriver will not work, Coreldraw keeps saying there is a driver issue and suggests removing and reinstalling (which I tried), so I ended up just using the Sawgrass ICC profile for the GXe3300n, and it worked a treat.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]1027[/ATTACH]

Why won't PowerDriver work? All PowerDriver does is sits between the printer driver and the printer. Once installed you print to PowerDriver not the Ricoh printer. The main reason for it 'not working' is that the OEM printer hasn't been assigned to PowerDriver which is a setting within PowerDriver. Anyway, if you're printing with the ICC profile installed then that's fine.

[sonywiz]

Colour right to the bottom, your mug press must be running nice & even. Looks great

[nik_decalarama]

No idea why it's not working. I downloaded the powerdriver for the epson r1800 and tried a test print on to transfer paper and that worked fine. I've since uninstalled that as I won't be using sub inks on it. Yet, doing the same thing for the Ricoh, using the same software just throws up a driver error. It will bug me for a bit as it makes no sense but the other mug I did had a union jack and the colours were spot on so I am happy with the setup as it is.

[nik_decalarama]

Colour right to the bottom, your mug press must be running nice & even. Looks great

the first mug wasn't quite like that, so I lifted this one a few mm and it came out fine.

[Bison 28]

Had exactly the same results, Powerdriver was faint and colours were horrible, the icc profile worked perfectly, probably something to do with the nice man from TMT who came out and set up my system after i'd phoned and asked for some advice.

[Sand & Sea]

Mug Looks great. Did you change the driver configuration on the powerdriver properties. Where it says OEM Driver. This needs to be set to Gelsprinter GXe3300n. It seems a shame not to be able to use powerdriver. Although you have got a very good result with ICC profile anyway.

[colglyn]

i phone sawgrass and they kindley remoted logged in and set it all up for me nice and easy i say and away i went

[nik_decalarama]

Mug Looks great. Did you change the driver configuration on the powerdriver properties. Where it says OEM Driver. This needs to be set to Gelsprinter GXe3300n. It seems a shame not to be able to use powerdriver. Although you have got a very good result with ICC profile anyway.

Yea, did that. It is a shame because it would have been less work and if I use other software then I will need to set it all up again. However, I use Coreldraw and can't see myself using anything else for the mug printing as I can import pretty much everything in to it. All seems to be working fine, I managed to get 16 mugs printed yesterday and they look fantastic, colours seem to be very deep in fact better than we expected.

By the way, I also installed the printer to my wife's windows 7 laptop and the supplied disc does not seem to contain Windows 7 drivers, but Ricoh's website does. Might be useful for anyone going from XP to Windows 7.

[nik_decalarama]

It's been a while but thought it would be worth updating to help newbies who are having issues. I have solved the powerdriver issue - it actually turned out to be something so silly. I have been printing one mug image to one sheet of A4 so I used a template in coreldraw that was just the right size. Everytime, I went to print the software would ask something about changing orientation as it wouldn't fit to the paper, which was odd as the dimensions are well within A4 size. Anyway, everyone of my mug templates were the same. Whenever I tried to print to powerdriver an error popped up asking me to reinstall the driver which never solved the issue. I started making iphone cases last week and started a template from scratch using an A4 template and powerdriver worked. I figured that the mug template was the issue. I now print 2 to A4 size simply by copying and pasting the mug templates I need and now powerdriver works everytime!

Also, a bit about sublimation paper that might help a few people. I have tried various kinds of paper and once even had to resort to photo paper as the type of sub paper I had was awful, it is now used as scrap paper for writing notes! (photo paper is a pretty good last resort paper if you run out of sub paper, problem is it can stick to the mug after cooking). I had to order a new magenta cartridge last week so thought I'd give trupix paper a go, I also ordered some of the xpres sub paper as it was nice and cheap from BMS. I did a few iphones cases and mugs along with powerdriver and found the results to be absolutely amazing! And that was on cheaper xpres paper - no more dodgy brown blacks or patchy colours, everything is solid and photos are looking fantastic. My Ricoh has been telling me for ages that the magenta is almost empty yet it's still printing - they might be expensive but they last for ages, so glad we went for the Ricoh printer.