HP B9180 not performing

I bought the B9180 over a year ago. Then there were 2 serious illnesses and a death in the family, plus life and other photo projects and I never got around to trying to print digital negs until today. It won't print them. It sucks the film in, prints nothing, spits it a couple of inches out, and then says "paper jam". I've tried the regular tray and specialty media tray; Pictorico OHP, advanced glossy paper, and plain paper settings. I've opened it up and cleaned it. It prints fine on paper. I've tried drawing a thick black border around the film with a sharpie hoping to help the printer "see" the film. The same result over and over.

I emailed HP to ask for advice and have recieved a reply that says the B9180 doesn't support OHP. I'm pretty furious. That's a huge whack of money I've wasted.

Aren't there people on this site who have sucsessfully used the B9180 to make diginegs? Have you got advice for me? Am I just plain screwed? It's out of warranty by now, I'm sure, so I may have thrown away all that money - plus the money and tons of time I've spent getting ready to try 3 colour gum. I've got the chemicals, the paper is sized, and I was going to have my first try this weekend. Now, I'm SOL.

I posted this at the end of a discussion from last year about which printer to buy, but thought a new thread might get more response.

Ciao Sly,

I have been using my B9180 with the OHP. I usually place a sheet plain paper behind the ohp, get them well aligned and feed them into the specialty media tray together. Usually the the two stick together just fine by static electricity, I guess, but I do sometimes need to stick a tiny bit of scotch tape on one end of 4x5s. I use HP glossy for the paper setting, max DPI in the print driver. I print with Qimage and use the HP Glossy icc profile. Make sure it's a nice flat sheet of paper, I have had the print head strike the film at the very end of the print and knock it out of alignment. Although this has always been with 4x5 sheets I have cut down.

Thanks! I'll try it and let you know.

Half hour later - works like a charm!! Thanks again. Now I can move ahead.

Er, just a curious question - if the printer has a hard time with smaller sizes is there a reason you don't print more than one on a sheet and then cut it down?

I used to do that with my 9180, gang 3 seperate 5x12 images on one sheet of 13x19. For example, I'd make a new PS document 13x19 in size, import each image and paste with the 'place' command, then print as one file. I had tried flipping the pictorico and re-feeding for subsequent prints, but always got roller marks and scuffs.

For clear OHP film, I've tried paper under the film, and that's worked, though as it happened, the film that I tried (not Pictorico) wasn't suited to inkjet.

The B9180 seems to work okay for me without a sheet of paper underneath using Pictorico Premium OHP Transparency Film, which is slightly white. This adds some extra density to the neg, but it doesn't seem to cause any problem when printing.

I tried cutting it down, but it seemed too fiddly, so I just print the whole 8.5x11" sheet. I usually want an 8x10" or larger neg anyway for contact printing. I tried enlarging a 4x5" neg from the B9180, and I didn't think the quality was good enough.

David, so if you had to purchase today would you get the B9180 for making digital negatives? Or are there other HP or Canon printers that you would choose?

There's a slightly less expensive model that doesn't have a display panel. If that is the only difference, I would get that one, not only because it is less expensive, but because the dry side of the darkroom is in my study with the printer, and I have to cover the display and the bright blue power button with black plastic in case it decides to go on when I'm printing (as in wet printing).

Thanks David. I will search for the other model. I assume from what I read in this thread that the HP ink set is uv blocking enough to get good alt prints?

I've only done silver so far with digital negs from the B9180, but Sandy King has used it successfully for alt-processes. When I get a chance to test it with albumen, I'll report back.