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Epson have seemingly introduced a radical change in the behaviour of their printer driver - changing a key behavioural aspect of their printers - with zero notice.
This is change you definitely need to be aware of - at least, if you're running the newer Epson printers (P706 AKA P700), P906 (AKA P900) (or future models one presumes!).
(We haven't had report of older printer drivers being affected, but it's quite possible updates to older printer drivers have appeared with the same control - we'd advise checking!).
[NOTE - See update at bottom of the article which somewhat clarifies things!]
For over 20 years when printing with Epson printers there has been a golden rule - software always overrules hardware. That is to say - the settings you put in the printer driver will automatically overrule the settings you've put into the printer's physical control panel.
This was often a point of initial confusion for people, but once understood it makes complete sense and makes for a much quicker workflow - in short, 99% of the time, you would simply load your paper in the printer (ignoring any settings there), then load your driver preset - which encapsulated ALL the relevant settings, including this about paper feed, width, margins etc. - and hit print. And everything works as expected. It's a much safer way of printing, really, once understood - as it centralises and packages all the settings in one clear spot.
There are disadvantages though - e.g. what if you also print from an iPad - then you DO need to set things up correctly on the printer control panel, as the iPad 'driver' is basic at best.
Still, for most people who use these printers - that is, people who want tight control over making quality prints - you'll be using a computer. And for 20 plus years with all the Epson pigment printers you could trust things would work this way, with the driver always over-ruling the printer control panel.
(N.B. Note we discuss and show PC screenshots below, but this new setting is also present on the Mac).
So, at some point, a key new driver control has appeared. And here you can also see the information you get about this new control, and the information Epson provide in the printer manual about it (which, again, was absent from our original version of the manual):
I don't find this information super clear. The general intention of the setting is clear - explicit control over whether or not the driver controls all settings, or the settings on the Printer's control panel come in to play.
However, exactly what settings apply when this is checked vs. unchecked, is not really explained.
User testing reports, for example, that changing the paper type in the driver still results in changes in the printed output if this box is NOT checked - i.e. when one would expect the printer control panel settings to apply with regards to paper type (which determines how much ink is laid down, a pretty fundmantal part of print quality!) - they still do not, even if this is not checked. So perhaps it is just some paper handling settings Epson are talking about. But it's really not clear when the line lies.
It's important to note that this box is unchecked by default. Meaning this big change in behaviour is the new default and of course this control is super easy to miss! Who knows how many people have been caught by this and experienced a change in their printer's behaviour with no warning or explanation after a driver or OS update.
I consider this a real fail on Epson's part.
The exact behaviour of this new control is not yet fully clear. Given that, it seems the best option is to do what we can to make these machines behave the same way all these machines have behaved, for the last twenty plus years.
Thus we strongly suggest you always tick this box to restore the classic behaviour of the printer driver over-ruling the control panel.
Without this, you simply can't really be sure what you're sending the printer, and there is a high chance you'll change some setting on the control panel - one that very well may materially affect the quality/colour output of your prints - and forget to change it back. Thus the potential for errors in printing will significantly increase. And especially so as there's no real clarity to what settings apply when this is checked.
(Rather than change the setting each time your print - we suggest you go into Printers and Scanners, go to your printer, choose Printing Preferences, and change the setting there - it should then become the default setting for all printing sessions - but do check this has worked!).
An even better solution, and one we've very commonly suggested to Mac owners (as things like this are unfortunately common place on the Mac, as detailed in out P906/P706 article) - is to simply avoid the Epson driver altogether and use a RIP system like Mirage - which will completely insulate you from and all driver and operating system changes. Not cheap, but with Mirage you'll simply never run into an issue like this. To be fair, though, this is the first time in PC history that I can recall such a change coming to Epson printing from PCs, so it's not like this sort of thing is a common event.
This is really a pretty big change - potentially it means, for example, that saved pre-sets in the driver no longer apply because (if this box is left unchecked) - the printer control panel may now overrule some aspects of that preset that you are not expecting. It's really surprising this appeared without some sort of warning of the change. Really - anything that changes the behaviour of hardware in a significant way should come with a big, obvious warning. Epson really should have done better here (...again).
The best I can work out, this change arrived (for us here) with our upgrade to Windows 11 (which I believe we did sometime early 2022 on those machines up to date enough to accept the upgrade). This must have brought along with it an upgrade to a newer version the Epson P906 driver.
Screenshots in our Epson P906/P706 Setup and Tips article show that this key change was definitely NOT present when we initially installed, evaluated, and used the printer. And that article specifically describes the usual scenario of the driver always over-ruling the control panel.
Since we last re-visited that article, though, we've done our Windows 11 upgrade. At no other point have we manually updated the driver in question, and looking through the Windows Update log, there's no Epson driver updates in there. So I'm pretty sure this can only have come along with the initial Windows 11 upgrade.
In general we never update printer drivers unless absolutely necessary - precisely to avoid any unanticipated change in behaviours. That being said, in 20 years of running countless Epson printers, they've never really made a change like this to be afraid of! It is just an approach of general caution - unless the upgrade would bring key, needed new functionality - then avoid it - better 'the devil you know' as it were.
Installing the current driver version on Windows 10 also brings this control - so it's not a Windows 11 issue per se, it's a driver version issue. From at least V6.7.8 onwards this control is present.
So - in short - if you're updating your OS, or you choose to update your printer driver, or need to re-install for any reason - please do be aware of this big change that comes along with the new driver!
A customer has confirmed the behaviour of this switch with Epson. Assuming this Epson person is correct (I say this as in my experience, they are very often actually in fact not correct about their own hardware...), here's what has been determined:
It seems the only function of the Driver Paper Settings Priority setting is to bring up a warning about a mismatch between the driver paper setting and the printer paper setting and then only if you have the warning enabled in the Paper Mismatch setting in the printer, which is disabled by default. The driver settings do override the printer settings, irrespective of the Driver Paper Settings Priority setting, when printing from Photoshop.
It really does seem to be a bit of a pointless setting and only adds confusion to the printing process. Perhaps there is some benefit when printing from other software but I can’t really be bothered trying to find out.
The driver setting here refer to Paper Type, Print Quality, Colour Mode etc - so all the key ones that determine print quality. And this only really clarifies the behaviour if printing from Photoshop (and, presumably, Lightroom, one imagines).
I'm leaving this blog here as a testament to how confusing this new switch is, and how Epson's failure to sensibly document a new driver feature like this swiftly leads to confusion. And the advice remains the same - it's safest to tick this box as it implies things will then work as they always have.
(And again, as per our recommendation below, if you use e.g. Mirage, you will entirely avoid such things and be insulated from the arbitrary whims of the Epson driver programmers!).
