Epson UltraChrome Hi-Gloss vs Ultrachrome K3 (A.K.A: R1900 vs R2880)

[jmooney]

Hi All,

I'm going to be buying a printer soon and I've settled on an Epson. I'm to be printing for myself and hopefully for sales as well (fine art limited edition type stuff). Primarily I'll be printing B&W from scanned film but I want to be able to do color as well for some of my work but mostly for portraits of the kids and such. I'm stuck between the R1900 and the R2880. The biggest difference I can see is the inkset. All Google turns up is official Epson documentation. I was hoping for some enlightenment as to the differences and which would be a better choice.

Any advice is much appreciated,

Jim

[Francisco Disilvestro]

The Ultrachrome Hi Gloss ink set of the R1900 use only one black ink (there are two cartridges, one for glossy papers and the other for matte papers) The Ultrachrome set uses 3 different blacks (or grays, and it also has the different matte and gloss black) so it should give better tonalities if you print in Black& White, as you mentioned in your messages. For color printing, there is probably not much difference.

[mrladewig]

Ultrachrome K3 is definitely going to give much more neutral B&W images than Hi-Gloss. I used to have an R1800 which had the gloss optimizer and replaced it with a R3800 which has the K3 inkset. Good B&W was always a struggle on the R1800. I do miss the gloss optimizer as that helped greatly with gloss differential in light shaded areas, but you can get around this with a print spray.

[Jeremy Moore]

Jim, I would suggest looking at the Epson 38XX series instead of the 28XX series due to ink costs. The 38XX series has much larger ink cartridges so purchasing the smaller printer is a false economy if you plan on printing consistently.

[gnuyork]

I have never used the R1800/1900 but I have the R2400 and I have absolutely no complaints for the K3 inkset, especially for B&W.

I am very particular with B&W and before that I used the 1280 with the MIS carbon inkset with custom curves... once I got the 2400 and made my first B&W, I was stunned at how nice it looked.