Old dog needs new digital printer tricks

[Joakim Ahnfelt]

Hi all

Today the company I work for suddenly bought an Epson Stylus Photo R 300 printer. Being a LF wet darkroom photographer since a long time and not really interested of giving it up I must confess that I have not been keeping up with the digital darkroom development.

My questions are:

1 Is the R 300 any good? (e.i should I bother)

2. Can it print b/w?

2. Will I need a lot of different ICC profiles and where do I get them?

I know my way around Photoshop very well on account of being an Art Director/graphic designer. I work closly with print shops that have state of the art high end scanners so that should not be a problem either.

Cheers

[Chris Mallison]

Hello.

Most of the Epson photo printers are quite good for color. That is, once you find a paper that you like. This model, however, only prints up to 8 1/2 inches on the short side. Of course, it will print black and white, but for the demanding user, can be rather frustrating. HP has a model in the same price/size range that by most reports gets excellent B+W right out of the box - it's the HP 7960. It has 2 extra gray ink cartridges that deliver B+W prints without a color bias. Some people find the Epsons acceptable for B+W, others switch to a third party ink, at least for the black ink. I use an Epson printer, but only about 20% of my work is B+W and even then it can be tricky. The question of ICC profiles is again a personal matter. Try the supplied Epson profiles first. If you're not happy with them, you may want to hunt down the Atkinson Profiles, using Google. Another possibility, without going broke, is QTR (Quad Tone RIP). But I believe it involves replacing the color inks with a set of gray inks, rendering the printer as B+W only. So many choices...

[Andre_3662]

1 Is the R 300 any good? (e.i should I bother)

Try it. You may be pleasantly surprised. Try the Ilford inkjet papers. There are printer profiles on the Ilford web site, hope yours is supported.

2. Can it print b/w?

I doubt it. Printing neutral b&w with color inks is always tricky: you may get a heavy cast (usually magenta) and the prints will suffer from metamerism: the tone of the print will change with the light source. And I doubt there is a black only printing mode on this printer.

I dont think that QTR supports any of the Epson R series printer.

[Randy Becker]

As to Mr. Mallison's comment about the Quadtone RIP, it does NOT require any special inks. It uses the standard epson ultrachrome inkset. I have been using it for about 9 months on both a mac and a pc and the results are astounding to say the least.

Epson's printers are (in my opinion) the best printers on the planet for making photographic quality inkjet prints. Their software for making color prints is very good. However, making neutral toned black and white prints is very very poor at best. The Quadtone RIP from Harrington.com is the best thing that has happened to epson black and white printing.

The only issue is that it may not work for the printer you are considering. Go to www.harrington.com, look for the Quadtone link at the bottom of the opening page and see for yourself.

Best regards,
Randy Becker