Large format Epson Printers Advice

[Bill L.]

I've never had the 4000, but I did have a 2200, which IIRC was a similar ink set. I found the 4800 had a slightly wider gamut than the 2200, and I tended to like the darker prints better, but not sure how much that was a profiling issue. My understanding was that the 4800 vs. 4000 had less metamerism, but can't comment from personal experience. All my printing is on matte paper. The newer printers are supposed to have an even wider gamut - every time my wife wants to print wild and out of gamut flowers on the 9800, I keep reminding her that if she does too much, we'll have to buy a 9900

Cheers!
Bill

Bill

[Martin Miksch]

I use the Canon IPF 6100 and I am very happy with printing quality and speed.
Regards
Martin

[Klyment Tan]

I am soon to be a former Epson 9800 user (and soon to be an Epson 9900 user), former user of the Epson 9600, 4000, 4800, R800, and have worked with the 9880 and 7880 as well. I don't have any longterm hands on experience with Canon's and HP's competitive products. When I was using the 9600 as my primary printer, I experimented with several third party ink sets. All of these ink sets gave me wider gamut, noticeably higher dMax on matte substrates (Epson's original Ultrachrome matte black isn't amazing). They all clogged similarly to the OEM inkset which I ran until the original warranty expired. Except for one inkset from MIS Associates . . . that ink had sediments in it which severely clogged the printer forcing it to require a few priming cycles with cleaning fluid. My Epson 9800 and former 4800 rarely clog. I researched reviews and visited owners of the printers (including owners of current HPs and Canon's). All three manufacturers have printers that, for most purposes, will produce similarly high quality output. The differences are in overall consumables cost, usability of the OEM driver, and ergonomics. To my knowledge, HP's Z3100 printers are still crippled by small ink cartridges . . . 130mL I think. While cost per milliliter of ink is similar to that of other current printers, I believe that all of these large format inkjet printers use some sort of droplet counter and not an actual measure of what is left inside each ink cartridge to determine when replacement is required. Smaller cartridges usually means more left over ink as a percentage of the entire cartridge. Furthermore, printers tend to go through some sort of priming cycle after you insert a new cartridge and this also uses ink. Staking out a printer as you are expecting a cartridge to run out wastes time and the smaller the cartridges, the more frequently you'll be waiting near your printer to switch cartridges . . . to a degree (sometimes cartridges will run out at roughly the same time but you get the idea).

With the x900 series, Epson FINALLY does away with the artificial need to do a wasteful and time consuming ink switch when you want to switch from matte to glossy black ink in a printer under 64". Until the release of the Epson 9900, I was going to go Canon with the IPF8100 for this reason. I wouldn't recommend the 7880 that you were considering if you are doing matte prints and sometimes use photo papers as well. That, combined with the increased print speed of the x900 series will easily pay for the price difference in time savings.

I think that Epson's paper feed choices even on the x800 and x880 printers is more ergonomic than Canon's which is in turn more ergonomic than HP which has you sort of loading paper from behind. The new cutter in the 9900 is supposedly rated to cut fine art papers and canvas whereas with your Epson 4000 (and the entire x800 and x880 series printers), Epson recommended against using the integrated $100 cutter blade to cut canvas as it would prematurely dull the blade and leave a lot of dust in the printer which could clog stuff.

One thing that I haven't experimented with much with the Epson x900 series printers is with profiling and how easily it would be to create a good printing profile without a RIP. Moving from light-fi as with the x880 and x800 Epsons to the hi-fi ink set of the 9900, the z3100, or the Canon IPF printers can be a difficult transition. I know that after attempting to create a robust profile for the Canon IPF8100 with just ProfileMaker and without a RIP, I gave up after a fruitless week of messing around. You can get your colours pretty accurate with some substrates but with others the colours were accurate in some areas but not in others, depending on the images. The printer that I was profiling was hooked up to a computer with Ergosoft Postrprint and after some fiddling with that, creating a profile was no problem.