Today, the Scitex and Iris lines are long gone, having ultimately been subsumed by Kodak, and Epson dominates the high end of the fine-art and photographic printing market, despite half-hearted attempts by HP and Canon. The company’s latest wide-format printers, the Stylus Pro 7900 (24") and 9900 (44"), represent a gradual, deliberate evolution of the line, not a sharp detour. Over eight months of testing the 7900, I found few surprises (good or bad), but that’s to be expected in a product line with more than 10 years of development (and success). What I did find, is a printer that is at the top of the heap with regard to photo quality, performance and paper handling, with a handful of negative issues that will matter only to few people. (While I did not test the 9900, most of my comments will apply to the wider model.)

UltraChrome HDR and more

The biggest changes in the 7900 are all on the ink delivery side. First and foremost is Epson’s 11-color UltraChrome HDR (high dynamic range) ink set, which adds orange and green to the standard nine-color pigment ink set that Epson has been using for years. Epson claims that the HDR inks—when combined with the improved HDR screening algorithms required for the new inks—give the 7900 the widest color gamut of any inkjet printer on the market, and both my eyes and gamut plots backed up these claims.

To get those inks onto the paper, the 7900 incorporates the MicroPiezo TFP printhead first introduced with the Stylus Pro 11880. This 10-channel head has 360 nozzles that produce variable-size ink droplets as small as 3.5 picoliters, as well as an ink-repelling coating that is designed to minimize clogs. At an inch wide, the TFP printhead is larger than those in previous Epson wide-format printers, which also means increased printing speeds.

As is the case with most of Epson’s UltraChrome pigment printers, the matte and photo black inks share a single channel to the printhead. This means that when you switch between glossy and matte (or fine art) paper types, the printer must purge the black ink channel and switch to the appropriate black ink. The amount of ink used during this process is minimal, and at this level—where most prints are designed either for sale or for proofing—I really don’t think this is an issue, but it is worth noting.

Other enhancements

While the HDR inks and new printhead are the obvious “big features,” the 7900 has a few usability and productivity enhancements worth mentioning:

• The roll-paper loading mechanism has been completely redesigned. Gone are the metal spindles and plastic adapters for 2- and 3-inch paper cores; in their place Epson has built an ingenious system into the printer that lets you easily add and remove rolls without worry.
• The paper cutter has been replaced with a true rotary cutter, and has been moved from the printhead to its own track at the paper exit point. This smart move minimizes the chances of paper dust contributing to printhead clogs.
• The handling for cut-sheet paper types is wonderful. Adding any size sheet from letter-size up to 24 inches wide is simple and rarely results in misfeeds (a constant problem that I’ve had with HP and Canon wide format printers).
• The control panel on the top of the printer has also been redesigned. The larger, color LCD makes it easier to see how much ink is available, and there are clearly marked buttons for switching between black ink types and adding roll paper. It’s not a huge change over previous models, but the improvements are nicely thought out and welcome.

Setup

The Stylus Pro 7900 is a behemoth: at nearly 200 pounds, you’ll need at least three people to set it up and get it into place. Luckily, once it has been assembled, you can move it around easily. The printer has both Ethernet and USB interfaces; most operations will likely use a networked setup, and getting the 7900 connected is a breeze. Epson also includes a utility with the 7900 that lets you check the Web for firmware updates, and will add them as needed.

The 11 ink cartridges that ship with the printer contain just about enough ink for you to load the ink lines and print a few samples, so make sure you’ve invested in a set of additional cartridges for long-term printing. Epson was smart about the ink capacities in the 7900, offering 150ml, 300ml and 700ml options, and you can mix and match any capacities. At 40 cents per ml, the 700ml cartridges are hugely economical, but your printing volumes might be better served with the lower capacity cartridges.

With previous wide-format models, Epson included a management utility that tracked print jobs and ink usage, which is a necessity for any shop that charges for prints. With the 7900, Epson has moved away from the dedicated utility to a Web service called myEpsonPrinter.com. This service has been in a public beta period for nearly a year, but Epson has gotten it to the point where it is quite useful for tracking media and ink usage. You can easily track multiple printers; set ink, media and overhead costs (including tax information); view charts of usage; download Excel spreadsheets of usage data; and more. Overall, I’ve found it quite useful, although I do wish that Epson provided a standalone utility for tracking jobs, and a number of other print shops with 7900/9900 models expressed similar concerns.

Print quality

Photo inkjet technology has reached a point where the leaps in print quality from generation to generation are no longer huge; they are incremental. With refined ink sets, better screening algorithms, and improved printheads, all three of the major printer companies—Epson, HP and Canon—have consumer-level photo inkjets that produce images of stunning quality.

At the professional level, however, changes in print quality, however small they might appear, are of extreme importance. Artists and photographers want the optimal print quality, with no visible “printer grain” and the widest possible color gamut for the best print reproduction on the paper that matters to them. They can see the difference between printers, and and this is where the Stylus Pro 7900 shines. The addition of the orange and green inks widens the color gamut to the point where, on most media types, the 7900 edges out even HP’s Designjet Z3200. On semi-gloss papers, the blacks produced with the 7900 were beautifully rich and dark, while still being able to hold shadow detail.

During the review process, I printed on nearly all of Epson’s professional paper line, in both roll and cut-sheet form, as well as a wide variety of papers from companies like Red River, Moab, and others. On fine-art, matte or glossy papers, 7900 prints were consistently clean, with no visible printer dot patterns, clean, smooth gradations of color, and extremely high fidelity with images on-screen (in a tightly color-managed environment).

When printing at the highest quality (2880 dpi) setting, the 7900 produced some of the most outstanding prints that we’ve ever gotten out of an inkjet. When I showed viewers images printed at 1440 dpi and 2880 dpi, most viewers could clearly tell the difference: the higher resolution produced the smoothest color transitions with no printer noise. What was more fascinating was that many 7900 prints at 1440 dpi still looked better than prints from a Stylus Pro 3800 or Designjet Z3200 at their highest quality settings.

And while most photographers are printing in color, the 7900’s black-and-white print capabilities are just as good. Again, the improvements over previous Epson Pro printers are slight, but prints on all paper types were drop-dead neutral, and I spoke with at least two print shops that were printing largely black-and-white photographs, and felt that the print quality was the best they had seen out of an inkjet.

Performance

The wide printhead on the Stylus Pro 7900 definitely helps with print speeds. On average, a 17" by 22" print took less then 5 minutes to print at 1440 dpi, and 7 minutes and 40 seconds at the highest quality setting. A 24" by 36" image took 10 and a half minutes to print at 1440 dpi, and 15 minutes and 15 seconds at 2880 dpi. At all print sizes and settings, the 7900 printed slightly faster than HP’s Z3200, which had been the fastest comparable wide-format I have tested.

Minor concerns

While the 7900’s feature set and print capabilities are excellent, it’s not a perfect printer. There were a few issues that came up during my review, most of which are relatively small, but they do bear mentioning:

• As noted above, some users will find fault with the fact you still have to switch between matte and photo black inks, but I have less of an issue with this in a printer of this class, and no 7900/9900 user I spoke with raised this as a problem.
• There was a fair bit of excitement regarding the optional spectrophotometer when the 7900 and 9900 were first announced, with many thinking that this would provide a way to profile papers (similar to that found in HP’s Z series printers). However, this option is designed for proofing with a RIP: none of the print shops we spoke with that were using a 7900 or 9900 for photographic output had the device installed. HP’s integrated spectrophotometer is a great enhancement, but most media vendors are providing high-quality ICC profiles with their papers. For me, this largely mitigates the need for a device inside the printer. However, like the black ink switching, this will matter to some users.
• Early 7900 units—mine included—were a bit aggressive in their auto-cleaning setting, but subsequent firmware updates have largely eliminated that problem (you can turn the auto-cleaning off, if desired). My 7900 still performs an unexpected auto-clean routine on occasion, despite my having turned the auto-check feature off, but it’s only a minor annoyance.

Conclusions

Wide-format printers are among the most versatile and cost-effective printers available on the market. While the initial cost of entry is high, the economics often work out for professional photographers and fine artists who sell their work, even if they aren’t printing at 24" or 44" widths. The Stylus Pro 7900, with its UltraChrome HDR ink set, excellent print quality and highly flexible paper handling, is definitely the gold standard in wide-format photographic printing. While both Canon and HP make very good wide-format devices, Epson’s commitment and storied history in this market segment do matter, and the 7900 is pretty darn good proof of that.

This is understandable: while the R2880 is a very good printer, it does suffer from a few issues, notably the smaller ink tanks and the necessity to swap the matte and photo black ink cartridges when you want to move between matte and glossy papers. The 3800 also requires a switch, but the process is automatic and requires no user intervention. The 3800 does waste a few dollars of ink per switch, which is troublesome, but given the rarity with which people change paper type—and its high-capacity (80ml) cartridge size, this is a lesser issue for many pro users.

Right now, the Stylus Pro 3800 is under $1,200 at Amazon (a savings of $100 or so), while the R2880 is priced around $650 ($150 off the list price). If you’re looking at the two printers, how do you choose between the two? I think it’s pretty straightforward: what follows are some of my thoughts, based on fairly heavy usage of both printers (and nearly every other photo printer in the $300 to $5,000 price range).

Why a two-year old product is still the best printer on the market

The Stylus Pro 3800 was introduced two years ago, and Epson currently has no stated plans for a replacement. In that time, HP and Canon have introduced printers that significantly increased the competitive pressure on Epson (especially in the $300-$800 range), but they haven’t really dented Epson’s hold on the photo printer market. And no one has really come out with a printer that rivals the 3800’s basic specs:

The biggest number to look at is the 3800’s extremely low $0.75 per ml ink cost, which is 35 percent less than that of the R2880 (and 40 percent below HP’s ink costs for the B8850 and B9180 printers). That alone will mean that you’ll save money on ink if you print lots of images.In our testing of the Stylus Pro 3800, the HP Photosmart Pro B8850, and the Stylus Photo R2880, the ink cost per 8" by 10" photo on glossy paper at the printer’s standard print mode was 61 cents per page for the 3800, 78 cents per page for the B8850 and 90 cents per page for the R2880. (The HP printer, while having a higher per-ml ink cost, laid down less ink on the page than either of the Epson printers, which is why its cost per page came out lower than that of the R2880.)

Ink capacity and cost

It gets even more interesting when you start looking at the ink cartridge costs. While the 3800’s ink cartridges list for more than four times the price of those of the R2880, you get 80 ml of ink for free with the 3800, while you need to purchase seven sets of ink—totaling $837—to get the same amount of ink with the R2880. That total cost, over $1400 (adding the $650 for the printer), is more than the cost of a 3800.

When my friend (and professional photographer) James Duncan Davidson came to visit Printerville a while back, we had a discussion about the economics of the ink regarding this: his post Inkonomics, does a much better—and more thorough—job of explaining this than I could, but the central conceit is the same: if you are planning on printing in any appreciable volume on larger paper sizes, the economics of the Stylus Pro 3800 are hard to beat.

By way of illustration, when printing our 200-page ink test, using a full set of ink cartridges on a fully primed printer, I had to make four cartridge swaps with Epson’s R2880, which cost me roughly $53. The HP B8850 required two cartridge swaps, which cost $68. The Stylus Pro 3800, on the other hand, was still ready for more—a lot more.

The quality equation

When it introduced the Stylus Pro 3800, Epson made a big deal of the new printhead, advanced screening algorithms and highly precise dot placement as the reasons why it produced the best prints of any desktop printer on the market. While it’s easy to lay that all as marketing hype, I can say—with plenty of backup from other photographers—that the 3800’s output is regularly better than any printer at its price range or below.

Does the Vivid Magenta in the Stylus Photo R2880 give that printer an advantage over the 3800? With some images it might, but it’s hard for anyone to see on a consistent basis, and, when you add the higher cost per page for the R2880, it’s hard to see why a pro photographer would go with the R2880 for high-volume printing.

And, while HP has made huge strides in the wide-format market with the new 12-ink Designjet Z3200, the B-size B9180 and B8850 just aren’t printing at the same level as the 3800—or the R2880, for that matter. (HP will also have its hands full competing with Epson’s recently announced Stylus Pro 7900 and 9900 wide-format printers, which could ensure that Epson continues to stay at the top of the image quality heap.)

The 3800’s drawbacks

The 3800 is far from perfect, but it’s pretty darn close. Working with two units, and observing the usage of about five other units among colleagues, there are three things that regularly cause grief, some big, some small:

• Ink swapping. While much less impactful on the 3800 than it is on Epson’s desktop inkjets (the R2880 and the older R2400 and Stylus Photo 2200), is still wasteful. We know that many photographers have looked to HP and Canon printers as an alternative, but the print quality—especially at the price—remains in Epson’s favor.
• The rear manual-feed mechanism. It often requires multiple attempts to load a piece of fine-art media via the rear tray. Again, this is a minor issue. However, if you’re thinking of printing on thick fine-art media regularly, using a roll-feed printer like the Stylus Pro 4880 is a better long-term alternative.
• The flimsy plastic front door. The 3800, like many of Epson’s recent photo printers, folds up nicely, which helps keep dust out of the paper path. Unfortunately, the front door, which slides down and out, generally breaks off after a month or so of use.

Most of these issues are generally minor, but they’re worth mentioning in a context like this.

What about the R2880?

Does this mean that we don’t think that the R2880 is not worth buying? Not at all. If you want excellent prints, are looking to print less than 50 photos per month, and the the idea of spending more than $1,000 is anathema to you, the R2880 is a great buy. As we said in our review, the ink swapping is really the biggest problem with the printer, and, if you rarely switch paper types, then you won’t find it as big an issue as we did.

The other thing that constantly comes up is the mythical “Stylus Pro 3900 ”, the unannounced successor to the 3800. Epson has given no indication that such a printer will ever be made available, but we continue to hear from people who won’t buy a 3800 because they believe such a printer is “around the corner.” But we don’t put any stock in it, especially given the logistics of building a high-volume, 9-channel printhead when they’re already moving to a 10-channel head with the UltraChrome HDR inks in the Stylus Pro 7900. (See my comment below for more on my thoughts here.)

Given Epson’s track record, the 3800 is probably still going to be the company’s flagship printer for the foreseeable future, and with HP staying out of the 17-inch market and Canon still floundering—despite the decent reception surrounding the (pricier) imageProGRAF iPF6000 and iPF6100—the 3800 remains the best printer in the class.

Wrapping up

I’ve worked with nearly every major photo inkjet that has been released in the past decade, and in all that time, there have been few printers that have both the high quality and design for hard duty. I have banged hard on two 3800s for nearly two years, and they rarely have disappointed me. Like Epson’s other Pro-series printers, the 3800 doesn’t clog, prints quickly on a wide range of media, and produces gallery-ready prints. Sure, there are little problems here and there, but the comments I made more than 18 months ago regarding the 3800 still stand:

If you’re looking to sell your work professionally, and you don’t need anything bigger than a 17-inch-wide print, the Stylus Pro 3800 is without a doubt the current benchmark at this level of the market. There are some fine photo inkjet printers priced under $1,000, but they’re not designed to be workhorses that will churn out print after print. The 3800 will do that in spades.

 
[Edited 12/10/2008 to clarify competitive set and to add comment link.]

The Z3200 is the successor to HP’s the Designjet Z3100 Photo Printer, which, when it first shipped late in 2006, was one of the most innovative photo printers we had seen in a long time. The Z3100 utilized 12 pigment-based inks (including a gloss optimizer) to produce high-quality, gallery-ready prints, but it was the printer’s embedded spectrophotometer (from X-Rite) and seamless integration with networked Macs and PCs that set it apart from competitors like Epson and Canon. HP spent considerable effort streamlining the process of printing: everything from unboxing the device to profiling and adding new paper types had been thought through by HP’s hardware and software engineers. The result was a printer that created top-quality prints and was a joy to use, day in and day out.

We’ve had a production version of the 24" PostScript model, the Z3200ps, for about three weeks, and have tested it fairly thoroughly with a variety of papers and applications. Overall, we’re very impressed with the printer’s performance: HP is obviously determined to keep the pressure on Epson—the market leader—in the pro photo space. As was the case with the Z3100, we think that the Z3200 should be looked at by anyone seriously evaluating a wide-format device to create salable prints.

Seeing Red

Not wanting to make too many changes in an already solid product, HP kept most of the Z3100’s feature set when designing the Z3200, keeping (for the most part) the 12-ink Vivera inkset, the same paper-handling options, spectrophotometer, and on-board OS. Most of the Z3200’s enhancements are inside the printer. In fact, aside from the nameplate on the front of the printer, you would be hard-pressed to find a cosmetic difference with the Z3100. The biggest change is in the ink: to expand the printer’s color gamut, HP has swapped out the red ink found in the Z3100, replacing it with a newly formulated red ink, called Chromatic Red. According to HP, this new ink significantly widens the printable gamut, producing much richer color that is more true to life.

For designers, the ink change is also important. With the Z3200ps, the model with Adobe PostScript 3 built-in, HP claims that it can reproduce nearly 95 percent of the Pantone color library, and the printer includes a number of features for dealing with Pantone spot colors in layouts, as well as a utility for creating Pantone swatch books directly from the printer’s front panel.

In our comparison testing, the Z3200’s output was very similar to that of the Z3100; the reds were definitely more pronounced with many images, although other prints showed little differentiation. This isn’t surprising; we are now in an age where the generational changes in print quality are truly incremental. Prints made with desktop inkjets are of such high quality that the average consumer is more than satisfied. Professionals, however, continue to look for even the smallest improvements that will realize their artistic vision, and changes like those in the Z3200 ink set are the things that they’re looking for.

To us, the ink change in the Z3200 mirrors Epson’s change to the Vivid Magenta and Vivid Light Magenta inks last year. As was the case with HP, Epson claimed that the two new inks increased the color gamut of their Stylus Pro printers, but they also admitted that many customers wouldn’t be able to detect the changes between the old inks. We’ve seen a number of test prints from the Stylus Pro 7880 that show similar sorts of improvements in color rendition and fidelity to those we’ve seen in the Z3200.

Other improvements

While HP hasn’t done much to the paper-handling features with the Z3200, they have made some small usability enhancements throughout. Loading cut sheet media is a bit easier than before, thanks to some adjustments to the feeder. (We do wish, however, that HP would add a paper guide for feeding sheets.) And, when creating paper profiles with the integrated spectrophotometer, among the parameters you can now set is the height of the ‘starwheels’ that hold the paper in place while the printhead is laying down ink. This is another intelligent solution to a problem that can come up when you’re using thick fine-art papers.

Speedwise, the Z3200 was significantly faster than its predecessor in our testing, showing more than 20 percent faster print speeds at times. For example, a 24" by 36" image took only 16 minutes to print on the Z3200, while the same image took more than 22 minutes on the Z3100. For high-production shops, this alone will help sell the Z3200.

The whole process of adding a new paper type to the Z3200 print driver is (thankfully) identical to that of the Z3100. You simply put the paper in the printer, and, via the HP Print Center utility, tell the device to print and scan calibration and profiling charts. Depending upon how much time you want to wait for paper drying times, you can be up and printing with your new paper in as little as 30 minutes (we generally dry our papers overnight and profile them the following day). In the Z3200, HP has added the capability to export paper presets, which include hardware settings, profiles, gloss enhancer settings and more.

HP is also announcing new media types with the Z3200, including a fiber-based paper called HP Baryte Satin Art Paper, and two lower-priced photo papers, HP Everyday Pigment Gloss and Everyday Pigment Semigloss. The Baryte paper is especially nice, and initially will be available only in roll format. (It reminded us of Canon’s Polished Rag—another of our favorite fiber papers—in feel and weight.)

How will it play?

As we’ve indicated, the Designjet Z3200 is more of an incremental upgrade than a ground-breaking new model, but that’s not a bad thing. HP is playing the game the way that it needs to be played. With Epson’s well-deserved hegemony at the top of the pro-printer market, HP has to continue to innovate and make substantive changes to be perceived as a true competitor, and we think that the Z3200 does just that. We know that some photographers felt that the Z3100 wasn’t as good in the reds as Epson’s comparable printers, and the Chromatic Red should go quite a ways towards alleviating those complaints.

The Z3200 has some strong attributes that should appeal to the pro photographer, but its best attribute is its print quality, which—for both color and black and white images—rival those made by Epson’s Stylus Pro wide format printers. When you add the advanced paper-profiling and usability features, the Z3200 becomes a very compelling printer for this key market segment.

While we think HP has the goods, they still need to execute, and, in the U.S. at least, it’s been a tough road for them. In addition to Epson’s well-earned reputation for products, they are firmly entrenched in the professional photo retail channel, and have a much greater mindshare among professional photographers and artists than HP and Canon combined.

In the coming months, we expect that Epson will make a U.S. announcement of the Stylus Pro x900 series, which include the Vivid Magenta inks, a 9-channel printhead that eliminates the matte- and photo-black ink swapping, printhead improvements and—like HP—an optional spectrophotometer. Given Epson’s position in the market, we have high expectations for those models, and HP needs to use any lead time it has to push the Z3200 hard in the market, and make sure that there is ample support in the channel.

As we repeatedly say, competition and change is a very good thing, especially at the high end of the market. As print quality becomes less and less the differentiator between products, other factors— usability, price, ink efficiency, and so on—enter into the equation, which help drive innovation. And, as innovation sticks, key features move on down the line to the consumer space, where an even greater group benefits.

The Designjet Z3200 Photo Printer will ship in October, priced at $3,395 for a 24" model ($4,695 with Adobe PostScript 3) and $5,595 for a 44" model ($6,795 with PostScript).

What’s new?

What does the R2880 have that sets it apart from the R2400 (and its competition)? Here are some of the primary advantages:

• An improved version of the UltraChrome K3 inkset used in Epson’s flagship Stylus Pro printers, incorporating the Vivid Magenta inks;
• A new color-matching technology, Radiance, designed to improve color constancy, reduce grain and improve ink efficiency (also found in the new Stylus Photo R1900);
• New mechanisms inside the printer that are designed to reduce head clogging and ink buildup;
• A tray for printing on inkjet-printable CDs and DVDs;
• Two USB ports, on different circuits, allowing multiple computers (PC or Mac) to be connected to the printer simultaneously; and
• Faster performance.

While the R2880 has plenty of enhancements, it also inherits one unfortunate trait from the R2400: the need to physically swap matte and photo black ink cartridges when you switch paper types. Given that both Canon and HP have been able to engineer ink delivery systems that incorporate both black ink types, this is a big disappointment, and one that puts Epson at a competitive disadvantage. For many photographers, this fact alone will eliminate the R2880 from consideration, regardless of the print quality or other strengths. We don’t think this is a fatal flaw, especially given the excellent print quality, but it is a major drawback.

UltraChrome K3 Vivid

Epson added the vivid magenta and vivid light magenta inks to its Stylus Pro wide-format line in September 2007, claiming that the new inks offered a wider gamut and improved black-and-white performance over the previous K3 inkset. In conjunction with the new inks, Epson is using a new color technology called Radiance, developed in conjunction with the Rochester Institute of Technology, that purportedly provides more efficient ink usage, higher quality images, and improved color constancy when viewing prints under different lighting conditions. (If you’re interested in a bit deeper discussion of Radiance, we recently covered some of the technology behind it.)

Attacking the clogged nozzle issue

Clogged print nozzles are a fact of life with inkjet printers from every manufacturer, and the R2400 seemed to be one of those printers that had more than its fair share of problems in this area. With the R2880, Epson is incorporating some new technology to try to eliminate the problem entirely.

The biggest culprit in creating clogs is time. It’s quite simple: if you leave your printer primed and unused over a significant period of time, some ink deposits can solidify and block nozzles. This is one of the reasons that most printers will run a cleaning cycle occasionally if the device hasn’t been used. Of course, this wastes ink, and it doesn’t guarantee that there won’t be clogged nozzles, but we’ve found that it does help.

Epson has added two features to the R2880 designed to reduce clogging: an ink-repelling coating on the printhead, and the addition of tiny glass beads to the ink cartridges. The coating keeps ink from building up on the printhead, theoretically lowering the chances of blocked nozzles, and the glass beads help ‘stir’ the ink while the printer is in use, keeping the viscosity optimal.

The company has also implemented an ink-collection technology that is designed to reduce the stray ink buildup that occurs inside every inkjet printer on the market—tiny amounts of ink that never make it to the paper. (These enhancements are also found in the R1900.)

If you use an inkjet printer long enough, you’ll notice that ink deposits and tiny amounts of paper fuzz can accumulate underneath the printhead’s carriage. This can often lead to paper jams and ink smudges on prints, and Epson representatives say that the R1900’s mist collection system, which uses a special electric charge to capture any ink overspray, is one more little feature that will help reduce printing problems over time. It won’t reduce the tiny amounts of paper dust that slough off a page as it goes through a printer, but it should reduce the sludge that builds as a result. (This is a problem that has begun to plague owners of HP’s Photosmart Pro B9180; for more, check this field report from our colleague Duncan Davidson.)

While we will want to see longer-term reports from the field on the anti-clog features in the R2880, we can say that, having printed more than 1,500 images on the R2880—and another 800 or so on the R1900—we have yet to see a clogged nozzle. We left the printer on for five weeks, with only intermittent printing, and never had a problem, something we couldn’t say with our Stylus Photo R2400 or our Photosmart Pro B8850. (We also left the R1900 on for eight weeks, printing a page here, and a page there, without running into any clogs.)

Setup

Like most inkjets today, the R2880 sets up quickly and with minimal effort. The 11ml ink cartridges snap easily into place, and the only real choice you need to make is what type of paper you’ll print on; Epson includes both matte and photo black cartridges with the printer. It doesn’t come with a USB cable, though, so you’ll need to pick one up.

Because it is a large-format printer—capable of printing up to 13" wide—you’ll need a large enough space for the printer to reside upon, but the top-loading paper tray and the output tray fold nicely out of the way when you’re not using the printer. It also helps keep dust and dirt out of the printer, which is another plus. This design was first used in the R1900, and we like it much more than the one found in Epson’s Stylus Photo 1400, R1800 and R2400: those models’ spring-loaded output tray was flimsy and poorly designed.

The printer has two rear-feed paper slots, one for rigid media, the other for standard photo and matte papers. Like most of Epson’s printers in this class, you can also use roll paper; the attachment isn’t the sturdiest, but it works well when set up. It would be nice to have a built-in paper cutter, however.

The R2880 comes with print drivers for both Mac OS X and Windows (XP and Vista). In addition to the drivers is a background application that displays the printer’s ink levels every time you print, an ink-reminder utility (that can be disabled), and PrintCD, a program for creating DVD and CD labels. The drivers for Mac and PC are almost unchanged from those used by the R2400, although the R2880 does add 16-bit printing support under Mac OS X 10.5.

Print quality

At this level of the market, the thing that matters most is print quality, and frankly, the R2880 offers the best prints of any desktop inkjet printer we’ve used. The addition of the vivid magenta inks does appear to create a slightly wider gamut, but it also helps increase the quality of black-and-white output, especially in the shadows. No matter what the type of image, or the paper chosen, viewers consistently picked the R2880 output over the R2400, the R1900, HP’s B9180 and B8850, and Canon’s Pixma Pro9000 and 9500.

The R2880 did a great job regardless of the paper type. On glossy papers, prints exhibited minimal gloss differential (sometimes referred to as ‘bronzing’), and papers like Epson’s own Exhibition Fiber (Amazon link) or HP’s Professional Satin (Amazon) produced stunning, richly detailed prints, with vibrant colors. On matte-style papers, the R2880 did an excellent job of reproducing deep, rich blacks and a fairly broad tonal range. Nearly all of the fine-art papers we threw at the R2880 reproduced well, including Epson’s Ultrasmooth Fine Art (Amazon) Red River’s Aurora Natural and Moab’s Somerset Photo Satin. It’s also worth noting that none of the R2880 prints—on matte or glossy media—exhibited any signs of scuffing or ‘pizza’ tracks, which is important to anyone interested in selling their work.

For anyone interested in black and white printing, the R2880 is a stunner. On both matte and glossy media, the R2880’s output is drop-dead neutral, with the widest tonal range of any printer we’ve seen under $1,000. In fact, its black-and-white prints can rival printers more than twice its price. For example, when comparing R2880 prints with those made with the Stylus Pro 3800—our favorite overall printer in the under-$2,000 category—viewers couldn’t find noticeable differences in most color prints. But, with black-and-white prints, most observers felt that the R2880 did a slightly better job than the 3800. On some fine-art papers, like Hahnemuhle’s Photo Rag, the R2880 was able to hold detail much better than the 3800. Overall, this isn’t surprising; part of the reason Epson went to the vivid magenta inks was that it would help increase the tonal range in black-and-white printing (even when using Epson’s Advanced B&W printing mode, some color inks are used), and the R2880 is Epson’s first large-format inkjet to use the new inks.

All of this should come as no surprise; Epson has long focused on quality, and the company has spent untold sums in improving their printheads and screening algorithms, all in the quest to produce the highest-quality prints. We feel that it’s worth noting that the improvements we found in the R2880’s print quality won’t be noticed by many consumers: the R2400, R1900, Photosmart Pro B8850, B9180 and Pixma Pro9500 all produce very good prints on a variety of media types, especially if they’ve been profiled properly. However, if you’re looking for the best possible color and black-and-white prints in a sub-$1,000 device, then the R2880 is your printer.

Ink life

We’ve spent a lot of time this year dwelling on the topic of measuring ink cartridge life in an everyday setting (as have our friends at Red River Paper). One of the knocks on every vendor is the cost of ink, and while we really don’t want to fuel the ink-consipracy theorists, we think it is important for people to get a sense of what it will cost to print. Using a methodology similar to that of our initial testing (and that of Red River’s), we printed 200 8" by 10" pages of Bill Atkinson’s Profile Test image on the R2880, and, using the weight of full and empty ink cartridges, were able to come up with a measurement of the total ink used, and a cost per print (of ink only).

Using this data, we can derive an ink cost per square inch, which lets us come up with an estimated cost per print size, as shown below:

While we’re still in the process of measuring a wide range of printers, we can say that the numbers for the R2880 are comparable to those of HP’s Photosmart Pro B8850 and other printers in this class. We want to be careful in setting expectations: the primary function of these tests is to give a comparable set of metrics across a broad range of printers from competing vendors, with a freely available test chart. Depending upon the type of photos you print, the number of copies and print quality levels, you might find that you’re using more or less ink than we are.

Performance

Looking at print speed, the R2880 is a very good performer, showing a modest improvement over the R2400, and leaving its primary rivals, HP’s B9180 and Canon’s Pixma Pro9500, in the dust. As we regularly note, speed is rarely at the top of our list for choosing a printer in this class, but it should be a consideration, especially if you believe print quality is relatively comparable across the different vendors’ units.

The first chart, shown below, displays the times (in seconds) for prints at the printers’ default photo modes. This is the setting most people will use, and one that produces very good results for snapshots and everyday use. As might be expected when looking at the newest member of the class, the R2880 is the speediest performer. (Click on the image to see a full-size PDF of the results.)

The second chart shows the print speeds at the highest resolution setting, the one that produces the most optimal prints, but which also uses up more ink. We rarely use this setting except for when we’re dealing with problematic images, ones with wide dynamic range, or when we want to create gallery-quality prints. Here, the R2880 continues to do well, although the gap is not as wide as it is at the lower quality setting. (Click on the image to see a full-size PDF of the results.)

The rough spots

For the most part, the R2880 really shines as a high-end, consumer-level photo inkjet, but there are a few things that prevent us from making the printer an unqualified, “must buy”:

• First and foremost is the ink swapping. After nearly six years of using separate black ink cartridges (dating back to the Stylus Photo 2200), we shouldn’t have to swap inks when changing paper types. HP and Canon have been able to engineer printheads with separate channels for the matte and photo black inks, and yet Epson—the originator of this market segment—has yet to come out with an affordable inkjet printer that incorporates similar technology.
• We also think that a large-format inkjet, capable of printing 13" by 19" borderless prints with ease, should have larger-capacity ink cartridges. HP’s ink cartridges for the B8850 and B9180 are more than twice the capacity of the R2880’s 11ml cartridges, and, while they are both comparably priced when you factor the cost per ml., you’ll need to purchase more cartridges sooner than you will with the HP printers. As a point of reference, we had to purchase eight additional ink cartridges (which cost nearly $110) to complete our 200-page ink use test on the R2880, while we had to purchase two cartridges (at a cost of $72) for the same test on our B8850.
• Epson continues to provide no mechanism for easily adding new papers to the print driver. If you use a third-party paper, you have to remember which comparable Epson paper type was used to profile the paper (whether you did it, or you’re using the paper manufacturer’s profiles). This is a usability issue, and, as print quality improves, photographers are going to demand much more user-friendly tools. Epson should be a leader here.
• Related to the driver/paper problem, Epson doesn’t even include a driver setting for their flagship Exhibition Fiber paper, which the company claims is optimized for the UltraChrome K3 ink set. The ICC profiles for the paper aren’t even on the Epson Web site; you need to go to the Pixel Genius site to download them. While it’s great that a third-party is producing high-quality profiles, Epson really should have them in the box with the printer.

With the exception of the ink-swapping issue, these really are minor problems that mar an otherwise excellent printer. We can—and do—live with them as small annoyances in our quest to produce the highest-quality prints. And, if you are like most photographers, you’ll gravitate to a few paper choices, all of which will be either matte or photo, and ink changes won’t be a concern. But if you want the widest flexibility in media choice, you’ll either have to choose an alternative printer, or put up with the lost ink used when switching (which we estimate at roughly $1.75 to $2 per ink change).

Conclusions

The Stylus Photo R2880 is a bit of a conundrum. The steps forward Epson has made in print quality and reducing clogs are hamstrung by the continued necessity to swap black inks. If Epson had eliminated the cartridge-swapping issue with this printer, it would be a nearly perfect product; as it is, it’s a remarkable printer with one significant drawback. In the end, if you’re looking for a printer in this class and price range, and print quality is your overarching concern, there is almost no reason not to go with the R2880. As much as we wish that Epson would improve some of the rough edges in their consumer-level printers, the R2880’s prints speak for themselves.

Epson R2880 Large Format Photo Printer (C11CA16201)

Epson, Electronics, Too low to display

We know that speed is usually a secondary or even a tertiary consideration when looking at photo printers, but, with today’s increased competition, it can be a factor for some people when they’re choosing an inkjet. Below are two charts, noting the print speeds for six different print sizes, ranging from 4" by 6" to 12" by 18" on the R2880 and the other three printers.

The first chart, shown below, displays the times (in seconds) for prints at the printers’ default photo modes. This is the setting most people will use, and one that produces very good results for snapshots and everyday use. As might be expected when looking at the newest member of the class, the R2880 is the speediest performer. (Click on the image to see a full-size PDF of the results.)

The second chart shows the print speeds at the highest resolution setting, the one that produces the most optimal prints, but which also uses up more ink. We rarely use this setting except for when we’re dealing with problematic images, ones with wide dynamic range, or when we want to create gallery-quality prints. Here, the R2880 continues to do well, although the gap is not as wide as it is at the lower quality setting. (Click on the image to see a full-size PDF of the results.)

The Stylus Photo R2400 was a fairly speedy printer in its own right, and, the R2880 shows a decent — not spectacular — performance improvement over the older model. It adds a little more of a performance gap with the B9180. It also leaves Canon’s Pixma Pro9500 in the dust, which is surprising (given the fact that a hallmark of the Canon photo printers is often print speed), but the Pixma Pro9500 is an unusual beast in and of itself, and is a bit long in the tooth.

As we noted, we should have a comprehensive review in the coming week, but we thought this was a snapshot worth sharing.

Here are some of the Stylus Photo R2880’s key features:

• Borrowing from the Stylus Pro line, the R2880 uses nine inks, based on the UltraChrome K3 Vivid Magenta ink set: cyan, vivid magenta, yellow, light cyan, vivid light magenta, photo black, matte black, light black and light light black. The Vivid Magenta inks were released in mid-2007 for use in Epson’s wide-format printers, the Stylus Pro 4880, 7880, 9880 and 11880, and feature a wider color gamut than the original UltraChrome K3 inks. Like the R2400, you still need to swap the matte and photo black cartridges when changing paper types, but Epson claims that the R2880 is much more efficient in managing ink usage and waste than its predecessor.
     (The R2880’s print longevity should be identical to prints made with the Stylus Pro printers that use the Vivid Magenta inks: roughly 85 to 108 years for most Epson papers when framed under glass, according to testing conducted by Wilhelm Research.)
• The R2880 is the second Epson printer (after the R1900) to use the company’s new Radiance color-matching technology. Radiance was co-developed by Epson and the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Munsell Color Science Lab to produce an advanced color gamut with better ink efficiency, reduced grain and more consistent color under variable lighting conditions (to help avoid a phenomenon known as metameric failure).
• The printhead in the R2880 is the same one found in the Stylus Pro printers, incorporating both an ink-repelling coating (also found in the R1900) designed to minimize clogged nozzles and a sensor that regularly checks the nozzles and maintains proper head alignment. According to Epson, the R2880 printhead also undergoes a precise colorimetric calibration at the factory, obviating the need for regular calibration of the printer.
• The printer has two USB 2.0 ports, allowing for two simultaneous computer connections. Unlike the R2400, the R2880 doesn’t have a FireWire port, but it does have a PictBridge port on the front that supports direct printing from a compatible digital camera. (While some people will lament the absence of FireWire, our testing has shown that there is no discernible print speed difference between the two interface types.)
• As befits the top of the Stylus Photo line, the R2880 has excellent paper-handling capabilities. It can print photos from 4" by 6" to 13" by 44" in size, on glossy, semigloss, matte, fine art and canvas media types. It has a top-loading paper tray that can hold up to 30 sheets of photo or matte paper, a rear slot for loading single sheets of thick media, a straight paper path for thick media, and a rear-feed mechanism for printing on roll papers from 4" to 13" in width. The straight paper path — which can handle media up to 1.3mm thick — also includes a separate tray for printing on inkjet-capable CDs and DVDs. (Epson includes a utility for disc printing with the R2880’s software bundle.)

Our take

At first glance, the Stylus Photo R2880 doesn’t seem like a huge leap forward, at least in print quality, but that’s largely because the R2400’s print quality was already pretty darn good. The Vivid Magenta inks definitely add incremental improvements in gamut and tone, but most users aren’t going to see big differences between the original UltraChrome K3 inks and the Vivid Magenta inks. Where we think people will notice a difference however, is in the small details: the things that Epson has done to improve upon the experience of printing.

We’ve made no secret of our disaffection for the Stylus Photo R2400, especially as HP and Canon have come out with more competitive inkjets. The R2400 produces excellent prints, but printing with the Stylus Photo R2400 can still be a frustrating experience. Many of us have had regular trouble with clogged nozzles on our R2400s, which require frequent (and costly) head cleanings, and, if you want to switch between the matte and photo black inks, you often run into the “drained cartridge dance,” a process that seems to drain more than just the black inks, requiring you to change other cartridges just to get your unit in a state where it can print.

We have been printing with a release version of the R2880 for a short while, and our initial feeling is that it actually is quite an improvement over the R2400. The print quality has been superb on both semigloss and matte/fine art papers (the R1900’s HiGloss ink set produces the best color output on glossy papers), and the extra light-black inks give the R2880 an advantage in black-and-white printing over any printer priced under $1,000. Black-and-white printing was always the hallmark of the R2400, and the R2880 seems to kick it up slightly, producing rich, neutral prints with excellent shadow detail and beautiful tonal range.

In the short time we’ve had our R2880, what has impressed us most though is its ink efficiency. According to Vincent Oliver, who reviewed the R2880 for his photo-i site in the U.K., the R2880 cartridges have an 11ml capacity, which is 2ml less than the R2400. (The R2880’s ink cartridges are also priced a dollar lower than the R2400’s, at $13.99.) This works out to approximately $1.27 per ml, roughly similar to HP’s Photosmart Pro B9180 and B8850 and Epson’s R1900, but still considerably higher than the Stylus Pro 3800.

However, despite the smaller cartridge size, after two complete ink changes and some careful comparison with our in-house R2400, the advancements Epson has made in the R2880 were readily apparent. Unlike the R2400, ink life was fairly consistent across all of the colors, and even with extremely low ink levels, we didn’t have to replace cartridges when swapping between photo and matte black inks. In our initial testing, we were able to print nearly twice as many photos using the same amount of ink on R2880 as we were able to do with the R2400, results that were even better than we had anticipated. [see our update on this topic here.] While some of this can be directly related to the advanced ink-mixing technology in Radiance, we think that there’s probably more technological improvements under the hood that Epson isn’t specifically talking about.

The reality though, is that we really don’t want to have to swap the matte and photo black inks; even with minimal ink waste, it costs some amount of ink to change the black cartridges. This is where HP and Canon have it over Epson, but it’s worth noting that this is as much a legacy of those manufacturers coming late to the party as it is intelligent design. Printhead development is complex, and each printer company has invested vast resources — in research, development and manufacturing — into their technology. As a result, printhead advancements are measured in years, and companies are often forced to use variations of a single printhead design for quite some time in order to see a return on their initial investment. It was only last year when Epson released a new printhead design with separate channels for matte and photo black inks, and that was for their 64" wide-format printer, the Stylus Pro 11880. Without possessing any inside information, we estimate that we won’t see the benefits of that printhead, which required new production and manufacturing processes, in consumer-level printers until 2009 or 2010.

We’ll have a full review very soon that discusses the R2880’s strengths and weaknesses in much greater depth. On the surface, however, the Stylus Photo R2880 appears to be well worth considering if you want top-quality color and black-and-white output at a lower price than you’ll pay for a printer like the Stylus Pro 3800. When you look at the photo printers that Epson has announced at this level in 2008 — the R1900 and the R2880 — it’s clear that they have no intention of ceding their position at the top of the market to anyone.

[Updated May 28, 15:00 PST to add correct ink cartridge capacity data, courtesy of Epson UK.]

Somerset Photo Satin is a thick (300gsm), 100% cotton fine-art paper made by St Cuthberts Mill, one of the oldest paper makers in the U.K. It is quite white, with a brightness of 97.5%, and it is free of whiteners and other optical brightening agents (OBAs). It does, however, contain buffering agents designed to help protect the paper from atmospheric contaminants.

The paper is extremely smooth—which is where we’re assuming the ‘satin’ designation comes from—with no visible fuzz or imperfections. It produces prints with a nice broad color gamut and deep blacks: color images are bright and well-saturated, and black-and-white photos have a warm, silky feel to them, with excellent range and rich blacks. (Moab says that the paper has a dMAX of 1.75, which is quite good for a fine-art paper.)

We were consistently pleased with the paper’s overall tonal range, detail and color transitions. Unlike some other fine-art papers we’ve used, Somerset Photo Satin holds detail extremely well in the shadows, without blocking up and creating areas of mud. On our Stylus Pro 3800, Somerset Photo Satin produced better color and black-and-white prints than either Hahnemühle’s Photo Rag or Epson’s Velvet Fine Art.

Viewers felt that Somerset Photo Satin was most comparable to Epson’s Ultrasmooth Fine Art paper, another of our favorites. Somerset Photo Satin has a slighter hint of texture than Ultrasmooth Fine Art, but it is also whiter than Epson’s paper (which has a brightness of 90%). Some people liked images on the Epson paper, while others preferred the Moab paper, but all said it was more of a personal preference with respect to the paper’s finish and color more than the quality of the print.

Overall, we think Somerset Photo Satin is an exquisite paper for people looking for gallery-quality prints on fine-art media. Moab has only posted an ICC profile for Somerset Photo Satin and the Stylus Pro 3800, but they should have more fairly soon, and we’re working on creating profiles for HP’s Vivera inks (for the B8850 and the B9180), as well as the Canon Pixma Pro9500 and iPF6100 printers.

Somerset Photo Satin is available in a variety of sizes. As we noted in our original post, it isn’t cheap: Twenty-sheet boxes of letter-size paper are $58, although we’ve found it as low as $42 on Amazon. Tabloid sheets (11" by 17") are priced at $115 ($80 at Amazon) and 13" by 19" sheets are $130 ($95 at Amazon). You can also purchase the paper in standard European sizes and in 17", 24", 44" and 60" rolls.

Photosmart C7280: bargain utility printer with big features

The C7280 lists for $300, but you can find it on Amazon right now for $165 (with free shipping). At that price, it’s a very good buy, with multiple connectivity options (802.11n wireless, Ethernet, USB); a built-in duplexer; secondary tray for 4" by 6" and 5" by 7" photo paper; and a sheet feeder for the copier. We had a couple of minor issues with the wireless networking, but once you have it up and running, it’s a great general-purpose inkjet printer. And, if you use it wirelessly, you can still scan directly to computers on your network that have the HP driver software installed. This is a great feature, one we’ve found extremely helpful in the months we’ve been using the printer.

The C7280 does a very good job as a photo printer, especially when you use HP’s Premium Plus line of photo papers, which produces much better output than the cheaper Advanced Glossy papers.

(One thing to be aware of with the C7280 is that there is no way to turn printer color management off, which means that you can’t use custom ICC profiles to print on other media types. This really won’t be a worry to most people: the C7280 will print good photos on HP’s papers.)

Stylus Photo RX680: good photo-centric all-in-one

Epson’s RX680 lists for $200, but you can find it priced online from $130 to $160 (Amazon). As a photo printer, it produces better prints out of the chute than the C7280, but it’s a bit flimsier than the HP unit (some of the reviews on Amazon and elsewhere point this out). It’s also USB-only, which makes it harder to network, but it has two paper trays capable of handling paper from 4" by 6" to letter- and legal-size and also has a duplexer built-in (the duplexers on both printers are removable, however). The RX680 does a good job of printing plain-paper documents, although you’ll need to use heavier-than-normal plain paper (like Epson’s Premium Bright White paper) with the duplexer: we’ve had a few issues—and seen reports elsewhere—that really cheap plain paper jams the unit.

The RX680 is a great printer if you spend more time working with photos: the scanner component has some great features for restoring old photographs, and it has Epson’s time-tested photo quality.

Now, hot on the heels of Epson’s Stylus Photo R1900, HP has released the $550 Photosmart Pro B8850 (Amazon link), which retains the best qualities of the B9180, at a lower price point (identical to the price of the R1900). We’ve been working with both pre-release and shipping versions of the B8850 for a few months now, and we’ve had few surprises: it produces very good prints with a few minor issues, much like its older sibling.

How similar is the B8850 to the B9180? Quite a bit, actually. Both printers use the same Vivera inkset; even the cartridges and printheads are interchangeable. Both printers also have a 200-sheet, bottom-feed paper tray, USB 2.0 support, and a specialty-media slot that lets you feed thicker media types. The three things that the B9180 has over the B8850 is that it can handle thicker paper (up to 1.5mm thick), an Ethernet port, which lets you use the printer on a network, and a status display on the front of the unit. (Since the B8850 shares the same basic print engine found in the B9180, the B8850’s print quality is nearly identical to its sibling on all paper types. Comparing prints between calibrated versions of the two printers showed no discernible difference in color fidelity or overall print quality.)

Setup

The B8850 is a big printer, weighing nearly 40 pounds, so you’ll need a sturdy desk or side table with some room behind it if you’re going to be using the manual feed path with larger paper sizes. The paper tray, which holds up to 200 sheets of standard-thickness paper, expands and contracts to fit the current paper size, and the hinged, front-loading specialty media tray is invoked by simply folding down the shelf on the front of the unit. Setting the printer up consists of installing four printheads and eight ink cartridges, all of which come with the printer. Once you’ve done that, the unit runs through its initial charging and calibration routines. (The printer has a built-in densitometer that is designed to make sure that each unit is properly calibrated with the default factory settings.)

HP includes a print driver for both Windows and Mac systems, and some additional software, including a simple printing application (Photosmart Print), a plug-in for printing directly from within Photoshop CS2 (HP worked with Adobe on printer integration for CS3, so no plug-in is required), and Mac and Windows system widgets for monitoring the printer’s ink levels. The printer’s management utility includes readable (and fairly reliable) ink gauges, and the capability to add non-HP paper types, with their associated ICC profiles, to the print driver’s Paper menu. This functionality is especially important if you do not have Photoshop (or Photoshop Elements) and want to be able to print reliably on any of the growing number of alternative papers available on the market today. We hope that ultimately Epson and Canon will follow suit with similar support for third-party papers.

 

Print quality

The B8850 has eight pigment inks, including separate black inks for glossy and matte paper types, and a light gray ink designed to help with creating optimal black-and-white prints. Overall, the print quality is quite good, thanks to the B8850’s nice wide color gamut, and the printer does a good job with retaining shadow detail on many media types. A few observers felt that the B8850 tended to produce a little too much saturation in blue and green tones, especially when compared with prints produced on Epson’s R1900 and R2400 on comparable papers. This didn’t make the B8850 prints bad – some viewers liked the more saturated look – but they tended to make some images look a little less natural without some correction in Photoshop or another editor.

For black-and-white work, the B8850 is very good indeed, producing fairly neutral prints that exhibit no visible color cast or metameric failure (a condition where a print exhibits a color shift under different lighting conditions). When you’re printing on matte and fine-art papers, the B8850 uses all eight inks when printing, which helps you get rich, deep blacks that preserve shadow detail well. For many people, the B8850’s black-and-white printing capabilities will be more than adequate. It is worth noting however, that when we put black-and-white prints from the $800 Stylus Photo R2400 into the jury mix, most viewers felt that the prints from the R2400 had a slight edge in shadow detail and tonal range than that of the B8850.

Unfortunately for HP, the B8850’s glossy output could be better, especially when you put it up against the similarly priced R1900, which was engineered to offer optimal glossy prints. B8850 photos printed on HP’s Advanced Glossy Photo Paper tend to look flat, with noticeable gloss differential (sometimes identified as “bronzing”) in areas of minimal ink coverage. This is a trait many pigment-based printers share, but part of the problem here is the media – Advanced Glossy is quite frankly, not a very attractive paper, but it is the one economical paper that HP pushes with the B8850 and B9180. We’ve had much more success with HP’s Professional line of papers, including their Professional Satin paper (Amazon), which has a hefty feel and minimal luster-style pebbling and Artist Matte Canvas (Amazon). The Pro media line is currently limited to 13" by 19" sheets, but the Satin paper especially produces a lovely print with deep blacks and fewer gloss differential issues than with Advanced Glossy, and many images printed on the Matte Canvas just leap off the page.

If you’re more interested in matte and fine-art papers, HP has wider range of offerings, although the company doesn’t really have any inexpensive matte papers that match up well with Epson’s Enhanced Matte line. HP has partnered with Hahnemühle offering smooth and textured fine art paper, as well as a very nice watercolor paper with a slight creamy color to it. As is the case with the Pro glossy papers, the really good fine-art papers are only available in the larger B-size sheets, which leaves a nice market for companies like Red River, Moab and others.

Most of the fine-art papers require use of the specialty media tray, which can handle paper up to 0.7mm thick. While on the surface, this might seem like a tight requirement, none of the beefier papers we had hanging around the lab caused any trouble with the B8850, at least in terms of weight. We did profile a number of the newer fiber-based papers – which use photo black ink and are thick enough that they require the manual feed tray – for the B8850, with mixed results. Some papers, like Harman’s Gloss FB AL, printed fine, while others, like Ilford’s Gallerie Gold Silk curled a bit on the back end of the print, causing the printhead to leave scuff marks on the page. If you’re thinking of using the B8850 with some of these papers, it’s probably worth picking up sample packs and checking online forums (like Yahoo Groups’ B9180 forum, which generally has good discussion about alternative papers for use with the Vivera inks).

Performance

As we noted in the R1900 review, speed is generally a secondary consideration when choosing a photo printer, but it is important to a certain degree. One of the complaints about the B9180 was that it was a bit of a slowpoke, and, while HP has sped the B8850 up a bit, it still runs a distant third to Canon’s speedy Pixma Pro9000 and the R1900. (Click on the images below to view a full-size PDF of our speed tests, in both the maximum quality mode, and at the default photo mode.)

Ink efficiency and archival print life

The B8850’s ink cartridges have approximately 27ml of ink, roughly twice that of comparable printers from Canon and Epson. Given that HP is targeting B-size prints, the larger capacity cartridges are welcome. It will cause a bit of sticker shock – the list price for replacing the entire inkset is $272, which works out to approximately $1.26/ml (Epson doesn’t quote the capacity of cartridges for the R1900, but we estimate that those inks are roughly $1.16/ml). We have seen significantly lower prices on Amazon for ink, which can bring the cost down under $1 per ml, and HP’s Web site has regular specials on ink and paper, so make sure you check the B8850 product page when you’re looking.

Because the B8850’s ink cartridges are considerably larger than those of comparable Epson and Canon printers, you’ll find that you can print quite a bit more before you need to replace ink. We printed nearly 200 pages of varying sizes (most letter-size or greater) before we had to replace a cartridge, and nearly 250 pages before we had to replace another ink. Because everyone’s printing needs are so varied, it’s hard to correctly gauge how much your ink usage will be, but over the course of four months with two B8850s (and more than two years with two B9180s), we’ve been very satisfied with the overall ink efficiency of this print engine.

With regard to print life, Wilhelm Research earlier this year posted preliminary print permanence results for the B8850 and the Vivera inkset, noting print life of more than 250 years (framed, under glass) for nearly all of HP’s primary media types for the printer. Wilhelm is also claiming that unframed prints should last more than 100 years, making the Vivera inks among the most archival of all the primary pigment inks from HP, Canon and Epson.

The B8850 vs. the B9180

The B9180 lists for $700, although you can find it for approximately $100 less on Amazon, and through other outlets. If you’re dead set on the Vivera inkset, and the B9180 and the B8850 are essentially the same printer, which model should you choose? The B8850 is slightly faster than the B9180, and HP’s strong set of software-based utilities means that the front-panel LCD, while handy, isn’t really all that necessary.

If you’re looking for a lightweight proofing printer, the B9180 is really the best option: its networking capabilities make sense for a small workgroup, and EFI makes a software RIP specifically for the B9180. Other than that, unless you need to pass really thick posterboard through your printer, the B8850 is a better buy.

The B8850 vs. Epson’s R1900 and R2400

Make no mistake about it: Epson and HP are battling at the low end of the archival printing market, and we expect both the B8850 and the Stylus Photo R1900 to be hovering at the magic $500 price point before too long. As we noted in our review last week, the R1900 is a breakthrough product, especially if you want the best glossy photos possible. There’s no way the B8850’s glossy output, especially on HP’s Advanced Glossy paper, can compete with the R1900’s superlative prints.

On matte and fine-art papers, the difference is less pronounced, and we think many photographers looking for a printer in this price range should find that both printers will produce excellent prints. Where the B8850 has a pronounced advantage is with black-and-white output, especially with matte paper types. By including a gloss optimizer cartridge in the R1900, Epson placed emphasis on glossy output, leaving no room for a light black or gray ink. We think that the R1900 produces excellent prints on fine-art papers; but the B8850 produces more neutral black-and-white prints.

When put up against Epson’s aging R2400, the B8850 also fares well. Unlike the R2400, you don’t have to physically swap out the black inks when switching between different paper types, which is important if you regularly swap papers. The B8850 only has one gray ink, while the R2400 has two, and that does provide a wee bit more tonal range, especially for complex monochromatic images, but we think the differences will be lost on most users at this level. (If you’re serious about black-and-white printing, and you’re looking to sell your work, Epson’s Stylus Pro 3800 is really the printer to buy.)

Conclusions

The B9180 was a surprise when it debuted in 2006. Up to that point, Epson’s Stylus Photo R2400 was the benchmark photo printer in the under-$1,000 price range, and HP hadn’t been able to produce a photo printer that satisfied the exacting standards of professionals and advanced amateurs. The Photosmart Pro B8850 doesn’t represent a radical shift from that printer; HP is trying to bring the cost of printing down to reach a wider audience by judiciously removing higher-end features. This fact will disappoint some who want exciting new developments with every new printer released, but we think that there’s nothing wrong in lowering price barriers.

The result is a strong, solid printer that produces very good prints, especially on fine-art papers and HP’s Professional Satin paper. By including innovative features that support third-party papers, HP is also recognizing that there is an ecosystem beyond itself. That said, we’d like to see HP work a bit on expanding the media options for the B8850 and the B9180. The company needs to come up with smaller print sizes for some of the Pro paper types, and, more importantly, they need to come up with a better glossy paper than Advanced Glossy. The paper is as important to the process as the ink and the print engine, and this is really the only place where the B8850 comes up short. But if you’re new to pigment printing – or you’d like an inexpensive printer that produces very good archival black-and-white prints – the B8850 is a very good printer at a good price.

HP Photosmart Pro B8850 Fotodrucker A3+ 6.0 Foto / Minute 4800 dpi USB 2.0

HP France, Electronics, Too low to display

Epson bills the R1900 as the ultimate archival printer for printing on glossy media, and the company’s claims are not unfounded — it produces the highest quality glossy images we’ve seen on any pigment-based printer under $2,000. But the R1900 is also surprisingly adept at printing on matte-finish and fine-art media, making it a highly versatile printer for photographers with modest printing needs.

Setup

Getting the R1900 up and running is easy; it’s simply a matter of unpacking the printer, snapping the included ink cartridges into place, connecting it to your PC or Mac and installing the drivers from the included CD. The printer has two separate USB ports, designed to let you connect two computers to the printer simultaneously. There is also a PictBridge-compatible USB port on the front, which lets you print directly from any digital camera that supports the PictBridge standard. It doesn’t come with a USB cable, so you’ll need to dig one up or purchase one when you buy the printer.

The R1900 has two top-loading paper feed trays; one handles up to 30 sheets of standard photo paper, while the other is designed to feed single sheets of fine-art or other thick media. Like the R2400, the R1900 also can accommodate roll-fed papers, up to 13" in width. There is also a front-loading slot for the included CD tray, which lets you print on both matte-finish optical discs, a nice enhancement found in many of Epson’s lower-priced printers. Both the top-load paper tray and output tray fold up into the printer, which helps reduce the R1900’s footprint when it’s not in use (and also helps keep dust inside the printer to a minimum).

Epson includes the standard Windows and Mac drivers that it has been shipping for years. They’re serviceable, especially if you’re content to use Epson’s stock papers. Epson includes a good set of ICC color profiles for all of the media supported by the printer, and has been posting premium profiles on the R1900 support site. To be honest, we noticed little difference between the premium profiles and those included with the printer, although there are separate profiles for media at each of the three different print settings: Photo, Best Photo and PhotoRPM (the highest quality setting).

 
One thing we would like to see in Epson’s print drivers is a little more flexibility for accommodating third-party papers. With the wide variety of excellent media available in the market, and the increased availability of ICC profiles for those papers, it would be nice to see Epson including a mechanism to add new paper types directly to the print driver. As it stands, if you use a non-Epson paper, you need to choose the Epson paper type that comes closest to your paper. This isn’t horrible, but HP has done a better job in its Photosmart Pro driver, letting you add third-party papers on the fly, and Epson should follow suit here.

Because the R1900 can also print on optical media, Epson includes an application, Epson Print CD, that lets you create CDs using simple layouts with photographs and text. It’s not a terribly polished program, but if you’re printing the occasional disc, it’s fine. If you want more, there are plenty of good shareware CD printing apps for both PCs and Macs.

Second-generation Hi-Gloss inks

The R1900 follows Epson’s successful Stylus Photo R1800, which was introduced in 2003. At the time, the R1800 was the company’s lowest-priced printer to offer both pigment inks and B-size (13" by 19") printing capabilities (a letter-size version, the R800, was also introduced around the same time; it is still available for $400 from Epson). The R1800 had a unique inkset, called Ultrachrome Hi-Gloss, which was designed to produce an optimal print on glossy papers, and included an overcoat spray called a gloss optimizer. This optimizer, which was simply another ink cartridge installed into the printer, helped remove the unsightly phenomenon known as gloss differential (often mistakenly called bronzing), where a print would display reflectivity artifacts between areas of white (where no ink was laid down on the paper) and color. In a high-key image, or one with severely blown highlights, gloss differential can create quite an ugly print.

The R1900 builds upon its predecessor and uses a new inkset, UltraChrome Hi-Gloss 2. Epson claims that the Hi-Gloss 2 inks offer a slightly wider color gamut and better quality on glossy papers than that of the R1800 (which was already quite good). There’s one change in the color line-up: Epson swapped the first generation’s blue ink for orange, a change that’s designed to produce better reproduction of skin tones.

While the R1900 has eight ink cartridge slots, at heart it is a six-color printer, like most photo printers in the $100-$400 range. There are five color inks — cyan, magenta, yellow, red and orange — one black (photo or matte, depending upon the paper type chosen in the print driver), and the gloss optimizer, which is used only when printing on glossy or semigloss paper types. Unlike the pricier Stylus Photo R2400 and HP’s Photosmart Pro B8850 and B9180, the R1900 lacks any light-density black inks, which means that it’s not really an ideal printer for producing black-and-white print. On the flip side, however, you don’t have to swap the matte and photo black cartridges when you change paper types, which you have to do with the R2400: the R1900 automatically uses the correct black ink when you print.

In conjunction with the new inks, Epson is using a new color technology called Radiance, developed in conjunction with the Rochester Institute of Technology, that purportedly provides more efficient ink usage, higher quality images, and improved color constancy when viewing prints under different lighting conditions. (If you’re interested in a bit deeper discussion of Radiance, we recently covered some of the technology behind it.)

Improvements under the hood

There are other feature enhancements in the R1900 that are neither readily apparent to the eye, nor will they necessarily be noticed when you start printing, To reduce the possibility of ink clogging the printer, Epson has added two features: one is a ink-repelling coating on the printhead, and the other is the addition of tiny glass beads to the ink cartridges.

Clogged heads is a problem that has dogged Epson for years. Although the company claims that the issue is overblown, we do know plenty of people who refuse to buy Epson printers because they think they tend to clog more than other vendors. Our experience has been mixed; in our testing we’ve had sporadic problems with printers from HP, Canon and Epson, but we’ve also had a few bad experiences with clogs on at least two R2400s. Regardless of the past, the new printhead and the glass beads should go a long way towards reducing these problems in the future, however endemic they really are. (We’ll also add that we’ve rarely had an issue with Epson’s professional printers.)

Epson also added an ink-collection technology, designed to reduce the ink buildup that occurs in every inkjet printer on the market. If you use an inkjet printer long enough, you’ll notice that ink deposits and tiny amounts of paper fuzz can accumulate underneath the printhead’s carriage. This can often lead to paper jams and ink smudges on prints, and Epson representatives say that the R1900’s mist collection system, which uses a special electric charge to capture any ink overspray, is one more little feature that will help reduce printing problems over time. It won’t reduce the tiny amounts of paper dust that slough off a page as it goes through a printer, but it should reduce the sludge that builds as a result.

Gloss to the max

One of the big differences between pigment- and dye-based inks is the way that the ink bonds to the substrate of the paper. Dyes are absorbed by the paper’s substrate, while pigments sit on top of the paper, often causing the paper’s finish to be obscured by the ink. Epson’s early pigment printers produced poor glossy output, but over the years, the company (and its competitors) has refined the technology — by adding glossy-specific black ink, reducing the pigment size, encapsulating the pigment particles in clear resin, and developing improved substrates — to the point where pigment printers can produce a very good glossy prints. The problem of gloss differential or bronzing has diminished greatly, but even high-end pigment printers that lack some sort of gloss optimizer can produce poor prints on glossy paper, especially if there are large areas of pure white in your image. (HP’s wide-format Designjet Z3100 is the only high-end pigment printer that uses a gloss optimizer.)

With the R1800 and the original Ultrachrome Hi-Gloss inks, Epson specifically chose to optimize its printer for glossy output, and they succeeded: the R1800’s glossy prints rivalled the best dye-based printers in the market. With the R1900, Epson has kicked it up a notch; the refined Hi-Gloss 2 inks and the improved gloss optimizer let the printer produce glossy prints that are unequalled on any printer under $2,000, in our opinion. Nearly every person who viewed our test prints picked the R1900’s glossy photos as the best of the bunch, better than Epson’s B-size, dye-based Stylus Photo 1400 and Canon’s dye-based Pixma Pro9000. Even when we tossed in prints from the $1,300 Stylus Professional 3800 (which we consider the top photo printer in the under-$2,000 market) viewers still generally chose the glossy output of the R1900 as the best.

One of the areas where Epson’s choice of red and orange inks seems to help is in skin tones; again, the R1900 produced the most lifelike images of people of all colors. While competitive printers like the Pixma Pro9000 and the B9180/B8850 do a very good job of reproducing skin tone, it appeared to our jury that the R1900 produced slightly better images over all.

The glossy output of the R1900 is so stunning that it’s easy to overlook the fact that the printer also does a great job on matte- and fine-art paper types. It produces deep, rich blacks and vibrant colors, and, despite the fact that it uses red and orange in place of the standard light cyan and light magenta inks found in most comparable photo printers, we detected no discernable difference between R1900 prints on matte paper and the same prints with the Stylus Photo 1400, HP’s B8850, and Canon’s Pixma Pro9000. There are subtle differences between the printers’ output, but for the R1900’s target market — advanced amateurs — they will be of minimal concern.

The only weak spot we found in the R1900 is in its black-and-white output. Lacking any light-density gray inks and light magenta (which most pigment printers use in black-and-white printing), the R1900 produces monochrome prints with slight color casts. In our view, this is an entirely acceptable compromise, given the thrust of the printer. For us, it comes down to a simple point: if you have to ask, this isn’t the printer for you. Most users rarely print in black and white, and for them, the occasional R1900 black-and-white photo will look fine. If you think that more than 20 percent of your photos will be black and white, then look at the HP offerings or at the R2400 and Stylus Pro 3800, which offer the best-possible monochrome printing.

Performance and efficiency

As we noted recently, the R1900 is quite speedy, trailing only Canon’s Pixma Pro9000 among comparable photo printers. After print quality, speed is a secondary consideration when you’re looking for a photo printer, but it is important to some, and, compared with both the R1800 and HP’s Photosmart Pro B8850, the R1900 is a speed demon.

In the standard Photo mode, the R1900 spit out a 4" by 6" print in 36 seconds, and a 12" by 18" photo in under 3 minutes. At the highest-quality setting, the R1900 printed the 4" by 6" photo in 39 seconds, and required only 5 minutes to print the 12" by 18" image. In all our tests, at both the default and the highest print settings, the R1900 was significantly faster than the B8850 and the R1800. (Click on the images below to view a full-size PDF of our speed tests.)

There have been some complaints on the Web about the fact that the R1900 has smaller-capacity ink cartridges than the R1800, although it wasn’t noted that the R1900 ink is also $1 cheaper per cartridge than the R1800. Epson counters those complaints by saying that the focus on cartridge size is misplaced: increased ink efficiency is what’s important, and that is one of the benefits users will see from the Radiance technology.

At a basic level, Epson appears to be correct. In our tests, we had to replace an ink cartridge in the R1800 after approximately 90 prints, most of which were letter-size or greater. With the R1900, we printed nearly 120 photos before we had to replace any ink at all (photo black), and nearly 160 before we had to replace a second cartridge. Ink usage also seems to be a bit more even than it was with the R1800; the R1900 does a much better job of using all six inks when printing, based on our experience. This is one of the tangible benefits of Radiance, where the print driver is using more efficient mixing when choosing which color to print at any given moment.

While we laud Epson for doing a better job at ink efficiency, we do think that any B-size printer should have larger ink tanks. If you choose to use the R1900 to its maximum potential — creating 13"-by-19" prints — you’ll find that you’re changing inks more than you’d like. We don’t understand why Epson doesn’t provide larger-capacity cartridges. Again, HP’s B8850 cartridges have a capacity of approximately 28ml, while those of the R1900 are reportedly about half that. It’s not a question of cost (although many people will grouse about the high cost of ink), but one of convenience: we would much rather have to change inks as infrequently as possible.

The archival question

While both Canon and HP have made big strides with their printers in the past few years, Epson continues to be the primary choice among photo professionals. This preference is not unwarranted: Epson has mastered the screening algorithms, the ink processes and the paper technology required to produce gallery-quality, archival prints. While its not a printer aimed at professionals, the R1900 gets the benefits inherent in Epson’s history. Chief among those benefits is archival print life.

Epson has done a great job at providing a broad selection of papers, that, when used with Epson’s inks, will produce prints that have a print life of 85 years or more, according to preliminary tests done by the print-permanence experts at Wilhelm Research. Wilhelm’s initial tests show R1900 print life ranging from approximately 100 years (for Premium Glossy and Velvet Fine Art) to 200 years (for Watercolor Paper Radiant White).

One paper that isn’t recommended for use with the R1900 is Epson’s new Exhibition Fiber media (Amazon link), which is unfortunate, because it’s one of the finest papers available. We did do some test prints with fiber-based papers from Harman and Ilford, with decent results, but it’s clear that the R1900 is truly optimized for traditional glossy inkjet papers.

Conclusions

While the R1800 showed that it was possible to get high-quality glossy prints from a pigment-ink printer, the Stylus Photo R1900 raises the bar to the point where we believe that a pigment printer can produce better glossy prints than a dye-based printer.

What’s astounding about the R1900 is that it is at the entry level for pigment printing. It’s not perfect: if you you print a lot of images, or, if you want the best possible black-and-white prints, you really will want a printer with higher-capacity ink tanks and light-density black inks. But, for $550, its possible to create stunning output on glossy or semigloss papers that outshine nearly any other printer in its class, and it does a great job on matte-based papers as well.

Epson Stylus Photo R1900 Large Format Photo Printer (C11C698201)

Epson, Electronics, Too low to display