Borderless Epson R-1800 Printing

Hi,
I'm new here (post no. 1). I am a Grad. Arch. student and I own an R-1800, by Epson. I love it, but had some questions that you all might be able to help with.

I am printing some borderless images for a portfolio, but find that in landscape i have to account for bleed. Is this normal for "borderless" printers?

For example, I have an 8.5"x11" image that I am printing in landscape. I have an Photoshop image that is exactly Letter dimensions. I find that I must account for 1/4" offset/bleed from the left edge of the image and 1/8" on all other sides. Is this normal? So, if I have an image, whose dimensions are Letter, i then must scale it down to 8.25" by 10.625" for it to completely fill the media. Does something sound wrong, or is it just me??

 

I don't have an 1800 and am not sure on the exact scale factor it applies, but I believe this is how all smaller inkjet broderless prints work. The print driver scales the image up a tiny bit aimed at amateur photographers / home users who want the print to look good, quickly and without the fuss of worrying about bleed dimensions themselves The ink is oversprayed and absorbed by a porous "foam" strip that runs the width of the printer under the injet head's path (you can see the wet ink on it immediately after printing) This is because the paper feed mechanism isn't perfectly precise so there is no way for the printer to truely print "borderless" perfect -- it has to print slightly larger. With traditional and laser prints this bleed area is printed on a larger sheet and then trimmed off; with inkjets the printer can spray the ink slightly beyond the paper without it ending up on the following sheet (unless something goes wrong!). There should be a setting in the driver for the 1800 where you can choose "Minimum" "Medium" or "Maximum" for the borderless scale factor, but that's it.