CS4 and new Epson don't enjoy one another's company

[kevino41934894]

Hello. I have struggled now for an entire week to get my new Epson XP-960 to work with my Mac, running 10.12.2.  The problem is that A3 and other special media may only be introduced into the rear feed on the Epson. But there is no option for this in the print dialogue box (Photoshop, file, print). With the help of online chat from Epson, I have deleted, added, tweaked endlessly. Epson's conclusion: it's an Adobe issue. Any suggestions? I'd be very grateful!

[kglad]

i doubt you can do much more than update your printer driver (which i'm sure you did) unless you update your cs4.  once you have the last cs4 update, you're only option is to upgrade to cc.

[Jeff A Wright]

Moving this discussion to the Photoshop General Discussion forum.

[Jeff Arola]

Update your mac sierra to version 10.12.3 and see if the printer works any better.

What about other applications like Preview?

Usually those options don't show until after you hit the Print button in the cs4 photoshop print dialog and another dialog containing the actual printer settings appears and one can set the tray/feed under Media & Quality>Feed From

[Randy Hufford]

I am a professional printer. I never update to newest version of MAC os or PS. Once I find a version that works I do not upgrade until I make sure other people are using it successfully. So change your OS to 10.11.6 el Capitan. I know it is a pain but you need to use El Capitan.

[Jeff Arola]

If someone has a new mac, then going back to an older version of mac os x is not an option.

They are stuck with whatever mac os they got until a newer version comes out.

Besides i don't think mac OS Sierra is necessarily the problem in the ops case.

[Conrad C · Accepted solution]

Epson might have gone over this already, but the XP-960 supports Apple AirPrint, and a lot of users have noticed that if the AirPrint driver gets installed, some options might be missing. So if there is a choice in how to install the Epson printer driver, make sure that you've installed the non-AirPrint version of the XP-960 driver.

Another thing to check is that when you open the Print dialog box in Photoshop and then click Page Setup to get at the paper sizes and paper feed choices, make sure the XP-960 is selected in the Format For menu. If Format For is set to Any Printer, you probably won't see the paper sizes and feeds for your printer, only a generic list.

I don't have an XP-960 so those are just ideas based on what I've read. I have an Epson 3880 which has three paper paths (top, rear, and front), and in my copy of Photoshop CS4, all of them are available in the Page Setup paper choices in the Print dialog box. This is in macOS 10.12.3. You said you're running macOS 10.12.2, so you can also see if updating to 10.12.3 fixes anything related to printing.

The last comment is that Photoshop CS4 is almost 10 years old. It's known that in the versions of OS X over that period of time, Apple has changed the Mac printing architecture more than once, and Adobe has rewritten the Photoshop printing code more than once to keep up with Apple (and Microsoft). There have been some issues in that time when Apple and Adobe printing was not quite in sync. If none of the suggestions you get are successful, it's possible that the gap is too great between your very current macOS and new Epson printer, and a 10-year-old version of Photoshop. In that case you might want to test a trial version of the current version of Photoshop just to see if the problem is only in Photoshop CS4.