Thanks for your input- are you just as satisfied with this printer for color?
I have had a epson 1280 for over a year. Get excellent results. Only one problem, which is true of all printers…the ink is expensive
I have heard excellent reports on the 2200, but have never used one myself.
On Sun, 24 Aug 2003 06:50:27 -0700, "Ronda Anderson" wrote:
Any recommendations, suggestions, warning on choosing a printer. First photo printer. (worked in black & white darkroom for 15 years, 10 years ago) Want to do color & possibly some black & white.
Looking at CANON I 9100, Epson Style Photo 2200 or 1280. Thanks for your input!
I use the Epson 2100 (2200 in the USA) and the colour reproduction is excellent. Printing B&W is something different; I just only got satisfying results with the matte black ink on archival matte paper. And then it’s really excellent!
Leen
I love my 1280, although I’ve only had it a month or so, and it is my first photo printer. Eric
Julio,
Where do you get the different types of Black colour? Over here epson told me that you can get various cartridge sizes but not various qualities.
BTW: My 1270 is great; I just discovered the customised settings to improve the quality of the print. Even more impressed now.
Robert
Robert
For the epson 2200 the each color is independent and I get it at CompUSA – a local retail chain. They are also available on the epson website.
For the 1270 there are independent retailers that sell many different color blacks for the 1270 – 80 series printers.
But as I understand you pretty much have to dedicate the printer to black and white since the original colors have to be flushed out and cleaned from your printer.
Julio
Julio,
Thanks for the information and especially about the singular dedication to Bl&W. I think I downgrade my abitions regarding bl&w untill I need a new printer. The old 1270 can then be a dedicated bl&w.
Robert
Robert, the 2100/2200 Epson printer uses black and light black (in the old days we used to call it grey).
Next to that, on matte papers, there is an option to print with a matte black cartridge instead of the standard black.
Matte prints printed this way display a really wonderful, almost "traditional fine art" quality.
Leen
Julio
If you get the Epson 2200- do you have to dedicate for black & white also?? Or can you use for both color & black & white?
Also, do you recommend the 2200 because of the longevity of the print? Thanks again
Ronda
Leen,
How much would a 2200 cost in Europe?
I want to be able to at least print A3 size.
Robert
Robert, within a few weeks my 2100 will be for sale as I am to buy a 7600 large format printer. People on the forum will have first rights.
Keep in touch.
Leen
Robert – the cost of the printer is but a microscopic drop in the ocean compared to the amount you will spend on consumables for it… I’d like a proper photo printer but I contribute quite enough to Epson’s profit margin as it is with the amount of ink I buy. Are the six colour printers any more economical with ink? I’m sure that in practice even if they were, I’d end up spending more as the output would be bettter. I’d love a printer that could do A3 – I’ve taken a few pics that I think could really handle being blown up that big.
Susan S
Susan, most of the reviews I’ve read say that the savings associated with individual ink cartridges are minuscule at best. I guess if you were to go into a ‘blue period’ a la Picasso it might be different, but, on balance – ink consumption is relatively balanced. I’m resisting the Epson route because of the head clogging problems reported by so many users here and elsewhere; I’m also steering clear of Canon (obviously my first choice with the cameras) unless and until they acknowledge the need to upgrade their inks to give some longevity to their prints. I don’t believe there’s an ideal printer for me out there….yet.
Chuck
Chuck, I’m here to report that my ePSON does not have a head clogging problem. From what I have read, it’s the problem with high humidity in certain areas of the world that causes print heads to clog and not just on EPSON printers. Those who do not have the luxury of AC in high humidity areas like florida or Australia in the summer would certainly have to clean their print heads more often. We had a prrrrty good streak of high heat and humidty that lasted a good month here….no AC but lots of fans which i had pointed to my cave 7/24…no clogs.
Jodi, thanks. Houston is the high humidity capital of the western world, and although my A/C goes almost continuously this time of year (how would you like an electric bill of $600 for a single month??), I’m not sure I could avoid the humidity problem. On the other hand, the heads of my cheap old HP haven’t clogged ever, so maybe the environment here isn’t so bad after all. Oh, well….not in the market at the moment.
Chuck
how would you like an electric bill of $600 for a single month??
Holy mackerel, Chuck! And here I was grousing about $120 for last month.
Actually where I am it is high temperature/low humidity that’s the problem – it’s not uncommon to have plus forty C days in summer – but the humidity is usually very low – north wind straight from the Red Centre tends to keep it that way on hot days (allowing evaporative air conditioning as a cheap alternative to refrigerative!). My Epson clogs up in the hot dry weather – makes sense to me as the ink left on the heads would evaporate faster in hot dry than hot humid.
Susan S
For whoever started this post about inkjet printers, you might want to look at this information from Wilhelm Research. He’s been testing printers, inks, papers and getting his prior information updated. The link goes to the page showing what’s currently in testing and about to be posted. Look in the column at the left for links to some information on the wide-format Epson and the new HPs. Until more test results are in, HP has – at least temporarily – pulled ahead on the issue of longevity.
<
http://www.wilhelm-research.com/upcoming_data.html>
On Mon, 25 Aug 2003 17:02:29 -0700, "Barbara Brundage" wrote:
how would you like an electric bill of $600 for a single month?? Holy mackerel, Chuck! And here I was grousing about $120 for last month.
Hummm same amount I had on my last bill here in Rhode island. This was our first summer with central air in the house. It was worth every penny of the price we paid last fall to have it installed. And worth the $120 bill.
But soon instead of high electricity bills, it will time to turn on the heat and pay for the gas. Can’t win
Talking about wet and humidity.
I live in Holland of which some parts are below sealevel. So far I did not have clogged up epson printer heads but sometimes do get prints with lines which I believe are a result of the way the heads are positioned. This occurs mainly when I go for prints where I underpixelated (hope this makes sense).
About A3 size. I believe that virtually every printer can be supplied as A3 printer. it is just that the consumer market is primed for A4’s. All you need to do is ask your supplier.
Robert
Any recommendations, suggestions, warning on choosing a printer
Hi there…while I don’t have information about a broad variety of printers, I did just buy an Epson 2200 and I can tell you what I like and don’t like about it so far (keep in mind that I’m not doing any of this professionally, and don’t have the kind of perspective someone who does would have).
Pros:
* Output is fantastic. I now need a better camera than my 5 megapixel Olympus, because the limit on the printout is the original image, not the printer. 🙂 (though actually, the limitation is mainly in color resolution…pixel density is just fine)
* Water resistant ink. On glossy paper, the ink is basically impervious to water. On matte paper, water does affect the printout a bit, but it’s not nearly as bad as ink jet printers I’ve had in the past.
* Flexibility. I guess this is no big deal with a lot of the ink jet printers, but having the wide format, roll paper feed, a straight-through paper path, and an automatic cutter is *really* nice. I feel like I could print on pretty much ANYTHING. 🙂
Cons:
* Borderless prints are "possible" only with the Photo Black ink, not the Matte Black ink. I put "possible" in quotes because you can lie to the printer driver and tell it that you’ve got the Photo ink even though the Matte ink is installed. But then the colors don’t come out quite the same. You also have to lie to the driver about the paper you’re using. Fact is, while you can get the driver to print borderless matte prints, the driver just doesn’t have the right information to do the printout exactly right.
* Complicated print settings. I guess this is to be expected from such a versatile printer, but there’s lots of settings for the printer that you can adjust. I’m a long way off from really understanding how to use them all. You can define your own presets, but they’re only accessible from the "Advanced" settings, so they’re not really much of a shortcut.
* Borderless printing crops the printed image more than I think it ought to. I have found I can work around the problem by adding a "matte" around the image (just a white border) that’s just a little smaller than the amount the printer driver trims. A tiny amount of the image still gets cropped, but not nearly as much as would otherwise. Still, it’s a hassle that I don’t understand why it exists.
I guess I’m most disappointed by the lack of borderless matte printing. In the short time I’ve owned the printer, I have really come to appreciate both the look of the borderless prints as well as the look of the matte printing. I really wish I could do them both at the same time.
On the bright side, glossy prints using the Photo Black ink look equally spectacular, just in a different way. And it’s really fun to be able to print from rolls of paper (even though so far I’ve only done 4×6 prints, which you can do borderless with the regular pre-cut 4×6 sheets).
Anyway, sorry for the essay. All of the above is stuff I wish someone had told me before I bought the printer. I would have still chosen the Epson 2200, but there would have been less initial disappointment if I’d been warned about the few limitations the printer does have.
Hope that helps!
Pete
Rhonda
The 2200 has 7 inks that it uses at the same time. Each color is individual. It uses two black inks at a time. You have the option of changing the dark black ink to matte black ink. Therefore you are able to print in black and white as well as color anytime.
Julio
CHUCK,
Dust off your brain…I have a question for you! My daughter is upgrading her computer system and has bought an "All in one HP 2210 Scanner" It copies, faxes, scans, prints and has a regular color cartridge and a black and white one.
When she prints Pictures she has to remove the black and white cartridge and put in another color cartridge that came with the scanner, making 5 inks.
Since all colors come from the "RBG" why would you need the extra cartridge…. Any ideas?
I’m not one for getting something that "does it all". In my experience the separate machines seem to do a better job.
(She says the dpi is 4800 X 1200 …. is that so important?) Marty
I’m not Chuck, but I’ll put my two cents in anyway…
"Marty Landolt" wrote in message
When she prints Pictures she has to remove the black and white cartridge and put in another color cartridge that came with the scanner, making 5
inks.
Since all colors come from the "RBG" why would you need the extra
cartridge….
It has to do with getting as accurate a reproduction of the desired color as possible, and the technology being used. Even though the original color can be described by just three different colors, remember that on the computer, you get to pick a value for each of those colors from 0 to 255.
Unfortunately, with an ink jet printer, you only get to pick a value from 0 to 1; that is, either the color is there or it’s not (the 1 on the ink jet printer corresponds to the 255 on the computer). The printer works around this by "dithering" — printing dots small enough that it can fool your eye into thinking it has a greater range than 0 to 1, by spacing them out.
As an extreme example, imagine you had only black ink, but wanted the entire page printed as a single gray sheet. The printer can do this by printing the solid black dots over *half* the page, rather than all of it, printing a solid black dot in every other spot the printer’s capable of printing. Unless you look closely, you’ll never notice the difference.
The absolute best color reproduction would happen by having one ink cartridge for each and every color in your image. Assuming a 2560×1920, for example, that’s about 5 million pixels. Since a 24 bit pixel can be one of 16 million different colors, we could fill that 2560×1920 image with 5 million different colors and have 11 million colors left over.
Obviously, a printer with 16 million (or even just 5 million) ink cartridges would be kind of large. So they make them with fewer. Whatever number they choose is going to be a compromise. In the case of the printer your daughter has, a black ink cartridge is used when printing black and white stuff, because even combining all five inks, you won’t get quite a perfect black (not that most ink jet blacks are all that great anyway, but I suspect the Epson 2100 is pretty good).
However, when printing in color, by using more colored inks and leaving out the black, the printer can get better color reproduction, *generally*. Of course, any blacks in the image will suffer, for the same reason that black and white printouts would if attempted with five colored inks.
Note that this is an issue particular to "on/off" printing technologies like ink jets and laser printers. There are other printing technologies that CAN reproduce shades of particular colors, and so can do a much better job with fewer inks. For example, dye sublimation.
I’m not one for getting something that "does it all". In my experience the separate machines seem to do a better job.
It just depends. The combo unit your daughter got is better at scanning, printing, and faxing than *some* scanners, printers, and faxes. Of course, it’s also worse at each of those tasks than others. Usually the reason for getting a combo unit has to do with price and space. They are generally less expensive than multiple units of equal capability, and of course they take up less room.
(She says the dpi is 4800 X 1200 …. is that so important?)
Yes. Just as you can get sharper images on your monitor by running at a higher resolution, a printer will printer better images if it has higher resolution. With ink jet and laser printers this is even more important because the dithering that is done to create shaded images winds up sacrificing some of the actual resolution, since any color not exactly represented by one of the ink colors available cannot be printed as a solid area. The only way to fool the eye is to have a large enough area where the colored dots are spread out, and the higher resolution the printer is, the smaller the physical area can be where a single pixel of the original image can be resolved.
Hope that helps.
Pete
Pete,
It sure helped me.
Robert
Pete,
That was more like $20 worth, rather than 2 cents . <G>
🙂
PETE D,
Wow!!! What a great guy to take all that time to share your expertise! It really did help…lots, and I know my daughter will be very glad to hear all your said.
I’ve copied it for me too.
Is there a "happy face" with puckered lips so I can throw you a kiss. (Hope everyone knows I’m a female Marty).
Thanks a bushel and a peck.
Marty
Marty, I remember when you first posted here months ago with your photo ‘challenge’ dilema….I though you were a dude…imagine my surprise to see this beautiful woman standing by her saddle !
For those of you who don’t know, Marty was the founder of our first ‘ weekly challenge ‘. She posted a pic for us to play with….Well, Grant did ( Hooray Grant <kiss> ) and from then on we never looked back…30 weeks and counting !
Marty,
I think you were referring to Pete Duniho.
PeteD is me! I said on another thread that I was going to start using PeteD since there is another (maybe 2 other) Pete’s here now. (I’ll take the kiss for him though).
Since "Peter" is Pete Duniho’s real name maybe he would not mind being addressed by Peter to avoid confusion.
PeteD (from the challenge…yeah,…that one)
PETE D,
OK, I meant the ‘kiss’ for Peter ’cause I didn’t want Jodi to bite my head off. He He… JODI,
Thanks for the update. I just know that pedistal you put me on will collapse soon, but hec, it feels so good today!
And being taken for a male has often been to my advantage…’cept, what do I do with all the viagra???
Marty
You might sell your Viagra by sending spam. Seems to be a quite successfull method considering the about 20 spam messages I receive daily. :-((
If I had accepted every offer …..
Ok, never mind, just a naughty thought. 😉
Leen
Hmmm. It might be time for some administrator to come along and shut down this thread – you guys are gettin’ kind of wild and crazy! 🙂
I talked my sister into buying an Epson printer when she bought a new computer (she has a Photo 825) and an Epson scanner because I was told they were the very best for art work. She’s cleaned the clogged print head at least three times, and she’s had the printer less than six months. In comparison, I’ve had my HP 960c printer almost two years and have NEVER had to clean a clogged print head. She buys Epson ink cartridges. She lives in a dry but relatively cool area (about 6100 feet up the side of a mountain)so humidity and/or hot weather can’t be the problem. It takes it forever to print out a picture, at least compared to my printer, even in draft mode.
And the Epson 1660 Scanner will scan and print from its own software, but it won’t scan a legible picture into Adobe Photoshop Elements (a scanned color photo looks like a three-tone disaster of a paint-by-number kit). I do have my own Epson 1650 scanner which works okay with Elements.
I am horribly disappointed with the results of my recommendations. I’m going to see if I can hire our local digital photo expert to travel to her place to see if he can get her hardware to work. Hopefully, there’s some simple answers why everything doesn’t work.
Marilyn Lee
Marilyn,
Your HP print heads are built in to the ink cartridge and get replaced every time you replace ink.
I believe that Epson has separate heads….separate from the ink cartridge (my HP cp1700 has this also).
She may have defective print head(s).
Pete
ya there’s also a couple of different reasons why this happens with Epson printers. The manual clearly states to ‘turn off’ printer when not in use by the button on the front. The one/off button activates automatic head clearing. Another reason might be old ink. I made the mistake of buying epson ink on sale once…never again. Old ( stale )ink will clog print heads. I own an Epson and certainly have not had continuous clogging problems.
Pete – Thanks for that info about the print heads on HP’s; I didn’t know that. Perhaps that explains the $54 cost for a high-capacity color cartridge. We run only HP’s at work (mostly LaserJets, though), which is why I chose that brand for my home use.
Jodi – We had thought about the "old ink" possibility, and I’m going to pick up new cartridges at a larger store where I live which might offer more frequent turnover. She does turn the printer off using the On/Off button. I know Epson’s are highly recommended by people in the art field, so chances are my sis just wound up with a lemon. I’m going to talk with our local digital photo guru and see if he has any suggestions for fixing the printer’s various problems. Appreciate your input.
Marilyn
Marilyn,
Would it not be possible to exchange it for another of the same model/price at place of purchase?…perhaps after divulging her many woes she could find a sympathetic ear. Despite Quality Assurance checks, certainly a ‘lemon’ must slip through sometimes.
Nancy
I have been following this with interest, as I might be in the market for a new printer, when and if I get a new Mac.
I have an old Epson which has never given me any problems except once, and that was my fault. I bought some cheapo ink and the cartridge leaked. Oh, what a mess! It must have been somewhat pressurized, as the stuff squirted all around inside the poor printer. I disassembled the whole darn thing and used a box of kleenex and about 50 q-tips to get it cleaned up and back in running order.
The Epson 2200 looks like the one I would get; I just have read the customer reviews on Amazon.com, and they are very interesting. Worth a glance.
Jane
Nancy – Re: Would it not be possible to exchange it for another of the same model/price at place of purchase? …perhaps after divulging her many woes she could find a sympathetic ear. Despite Quality Assurance checks, certainly a ‘lemon’ must slip through sometimes.
I’m sure she has had the printer too long to return it now, but thanks for the suggestion. Also, she bought it on line, so she can’t take it back to the store for someone to check out. Like so many of us, my sister (who is far from a computer whiz) assumes that anything wrong with her hardware or software is always caused by something SHE is doing wrong, so she lives with it. She has a lot of patience (a ton more than I do), so we’ll keep trying to get her printer and scanner to work properly.
Marilyn
Marilyn,
Oh, I see. She’s lucky to have your help.
Nancy
I have old HP printer…however I can get my ink jets at Sams and fortunately the HP ones have expiration dates. I always search for the longest period of time available (I buy the double packages)before expiration. Some brands of ink do not show expiration date, but be sure and look for one just in case! Dorothy
