toddvachonphotography

If you are looking at purchasing a pigment-based photo printer, there are some invisible costs associated with owning one that you should be aware of. What follows is from my personal experience with Epson’s pigment-based printers:

[Note: Let me make it clear that I am comparing my actual experience with Epson pigment-based printers with the claims (and more fairly, reviews of those products) other manufacturers make about their printers. Realize that this isn't an entirely fair comparison. Claims and actual performance are two different animals. My purpose is to help you be better informed on any decision to purchase you might make.]

I speak from experience here. I personally own and print with an Epson 2200 (13 width), the studio I manage uses a R2400 (successor to the 2200), and the university photo department I work for owns 6 Epsons, including four 2200′s, a 4800 (17″ width) and a 7800 (24″ width) that I help administer and am mostly responsible for influencing the purchase of. Before I say what I’m going to say, let’s get one thing clear up front. I think Epson printers make excellent images. They have definitely been the industry leader in photo-quality inkjet output for years. I have no problem with the output I can get from these printers. What I take issue with is the difficulty in getting it.

But there are some new kids in town, and what follows are some little details you need to know before making your purchasing decision.

1. Epson’s print heads tend to clog. A lot. Understand that I am talking about pigment-based printers here, using the Ultrachrome and Ultrachrome K3 inksets. Most photographers are using pigment-based inks because of their resistance to fading. The trouble is, if you leave the aforementioned printers for more than a day or two, chances are they will develop clogged heads, which means running a cleaning cycle, or two, or three… That uses a lot of ink, which is $100 for a complete set for the 2200/2400. When these printers clean their heads, they run ink through ALL of the heads, not just the ones that are clogged. Compare that to the new HP B9180 which can detect individual clogged jets and clean or compensate for them as necessary without wasting inks though all the heads as noted in this review by inkjetart.com

2. Swapping the photo black and matte black inks wastes ink too. Because Epson chose a design that necessitates swapping out one black for the other when switching papers, Every time you install a different black ink, it has to re-prime the head (pump out all the old ink) which equals less prints per cartridge.

It’s no secret that printer manufacturers make most of their money selling you paper and replacement ink cartridges. I can say from experience that if I were to estimate whether more ink went down the drain or onto paper with Epson’s printers, I would be hard pressed to make a call. Which brings us to:

3. Swapping the photo black and matte black inks is a real pain, at least on the mac. The main reason for this seems to be the company’s failure to invest time and money into software development. When you switch black inks on a mac (I can’t speak for a PC) and try to print, Epson’s printer driver throws an error and won’t print. It requires you to delete the printer from your printer list and re-add it in order to print with the new ink. What it doesn’t tell you is that you also need to quit the application (Photoshop for instance) you are using at the same time and re-start it after adding the printer or else it will throw an error again. This is a big pain if you want to try printing a certain image on different surface papers. It can realistically burn up a half hour each time you switch. After countless calls to Epson tech support and a face-to-face with an actual Epson software coder, I still have no answer as to why Epson can’t write a driver that can detect what ink is in the printer (which it already does) and just print with it (which it can’t seem to do). To add insult to injury, any print presets you set in the driver are cleared when you re-add the printer. The names of the presets deceivingly remain, but the settings clear. Can you say, “wasted print?” Additionally, both HP and Canon provide drivers that integrate with Photoshop’s Print with Preview dialog box, so all your settings can be made in one place, Epson does not.

On my recent visit to this years PhotoPlus convention in NYC, I was impressed with the quality of images in both the Canon and surprisingly, the HP booths. Both offer comparable printers with pigment-based inksets, both matte and photo-black inks that don’t need to be swapped out, and LARGER CAPACITY cartridges, which means less wasted ink. I don’t personally have any time printing with one—yet—and I am always skeptical about sample prints from printer manufacturers. But I’ll be checking them out soon as I am on the market for a less-frustrating printer. Check out the Canon Pixma Pro 9500(not yet released as of this post), and the HP B9180 review at Luminous Landscape as alternatives.