Ricoh GXe3300N Borderless Printing Solution

[teknokat]

Hi,

I bought the above printer a couple of weeks ago as I'm just starting to get to grips with all this sublimation malarkey! Anyway when I was pressing the medium size place mats & ipad covers from BMS I realised their was little to no room for error when pressing them and with the ipad covers I always got a part of the cover still having a white border due to the printer insisting on leaving a white border round the image no matter how big I made the image. Anyway after searching Google and getting told this printer did not do borderless printing I played with the settings and found a solution so I thought I'd share it with other users of this printer in case they too had the same issue. Anyway rambling over onto the solution.

in the powerdriver settings next to paper size click the '+' button

name the form name anything you want but 'borderless' made sense for me

change units to metric

set the width to 23cm & height to 30cm (i only needed borderless printing in width so you might need to set the height to 32cm if you require borderless printing for the whole A4 sheet)

click add form

click OK to closedown the powerdriver settings and then open the powerdriver settings again and a new paper size will be available called 'borderless'

when you want to print an image make sure the width of the image is at least 21.5cm and ensure you set the paper size to your newly created borderless in the powerdriver settings and it should print to the very edge of the paper.

I'm printing from photoshop so I also unchecked center image and set the top and left position to 0 (zero) and also unchecked scale to fit media

I found by doing this it it printed to the edge which gave me more of a bleed area around the width for the ipad covers so no more white border and more room to manipulate the printed image when printing the medium sized place mats.

I hope this helps someone who was in the same position as me and thanks to everyone for making this such a great forum for beginners like me to start wanting to sublimate anything that moves

[Paul]

great post ;)

thanks for that!

...and welcome on forum ;P

[JSR]

Great tip.

Just be a little wary, though. Printers designed for "borderless" have a sponge that runs beneath the carriage for the full width of the printer to "soak up" the ink overspray that's caused by printing borderless. If the Ricoh doesn't have this then any overspray may end up in the wrong place.

[John G]

It is a good tip but i'd prefer to keep the inside carriage clean as JSR mentioned above

[Ian Mc]

I'd avoid doing it myself - I've had to clean ink off the belt in my GX7000 in the past. It wasn't an especially fun experience. :/

[logobear]

This is a great tip but I agree that it will give you problems in the future.As soon as you start getting ink in the wrong places everything will be spoilt.For emergency situations you could glue your A4 sheet to a 23cm wide carrier page and let the printer take them both through.

[schizowife]

ok maybe being a total duh!!!! but i cannot find power driver settings in printing preferences anywhere.

[Paul]

is not this??

[schizowife]

Thankyou Paul, no mine did not look like that as i was using just the driver that came with the ricoh. I have now downoaded the power driver thanks :)

[barryslip]

I've been striggling to get the Ricoh 3300N to print full A4 too, to allow me to print on A4 jigsaws. I can never get it quite right - always a tiny strip of white left on the edge of the jigsaw. It's almost as if the printer can see the edges of the paper even when you try to fool it by selecting a larger paper type.

I contacted Sawgrass yesterday and asked if there was a way around it. They advised that the printer can print "US Legal" paper which is wider and longer than A4 (it measures 8.5" x 14"). So, I cut up a piece of A3 paper to these dimensions and placed it in the paper tray (the tray needs to be extended to fit US Legal paper, but there are 2 plastic lugs on each side allowing you to do this). I opened my A4 template in PhotoShop, dragged the photo in and went to print. In the "Print" screen, I clicked "Page Setup" to open the PowerDriver screen - here I selected Paper Size "Legal". Back in PhotoShop I selected "Centre Image" and de-selected "Scale to fit media".

Hey Presto!!! Out popped a lovely page with an A4 image right in the centre!

OK, it's a whole sheet of A3 required to do this, but the offcuts (used at the start of the process to make a "US Legal" size) are suitable for keyrings and other small items.

I hope that this is helpful to other Ricoh owners!