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).

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.]

We’ve been playing with a final-release sample of the B8850 for a few weeks now, and have been quite impressed with the overall performance of the printer. What follows is our short take on the printer. While there might be some small details that change with shipping units, we think the tenor of our review will be the same.

Here are the B8850’s basic specs:

• Eight Vivera pigment inks—cyan, magenta, yellow, light cyan, light magenta, gray, and photo and matte blacks. Each cartridge holds 27ml of ink.
• Bottom-feed paper tray that holds up to 200 sheets of standard office paper.
• Front-load, specialty media tray for loading a single sheet paper up to 0.7mm thick.
• USB 2.0 connectivity (no cable in box, however).
• Print sizes supported range from 3" by 5" index cards to 13" by 44" panoramics
• Borderless printing on most standard print formats from 4" by 6" up to 13" by 19".
• Operating systems supported: Mac OS X; Microsoft Windows XP; Microsoft Windows Vista.

Quick and easy setup

The B8850 sets up in a jiffy. The cartridges and the printheads snap easily into place, and the printer takes about 15 minutes or so to charge the lines with ink and perform other initialization tasks.

To ensure consistent color from unit to unit, the B8850 includes an internal densitometer that calibrates your unit with the factory defaults; whenever you change an ink cartridge or let the printer sit for a while, HP recommends that you recalibrate the printer, which is a simple task accessed via the HP Print Utility, and uses a few sheets of HP’s Advanced Glossy Paper.

With the printer is a disc that contains both the Mac and Windows print drivers, the Print Utility, a custom printing plug-in for Adobe Photoshop CS2, the Photosmart Print utility and widgets for keeping an eye on ink levels. (Adobe and HP worked to integrate the B8850 and Photoshop CS3, so the plug-in is no longer required.)

 
The B8850 has ink-level widgets for both Mac and Windows systems.
 

Adding custom paper

One of the things that makes the HP print driver more advanced than those from Canon and Epson is the functionality to add third-party papers and their associated ICC profiles. At any point—even with the print dialog box on-screen—you can add a custom paper to the Paper Type menu. It’s quick and easy, and something that Epson and Canon should incorporate into their higher-end photo printers.

 

Once you’ve added the paper, all you have to do to print on that paper type is to select it in the driver. You don’t have to guess which Epson or Canon paper corresponds to the paper you’ve chosen, and you can print easily from other applications without having to worry about color matching (assuming that the application handles it correctly).

Print quality

With the release of the Photosmart Pro B9180 in 2006 (reviews on Macworld, Luminous Landscape), HP crossed the image quality barrier with a printer that produced photos as good as those printed with Epson’s $800 Stylus Photo R2400 desktop printer. The good news for potential B8850 buyers is that it uses the B9180’s print engine and inks (the cartridges are identical), and thus offers the same print quality as its higher-priced sibling.

The B8850’s eight inks produce a wide gamut that is capable of reproducing almost any color image faithfully. While it might not resolve detail to the level that we find with Epson’s Stylus Pro 3800, nearly every test image we printed was comparable in quality and color fidelity to any other photo printer in the $500-$1,000 range.

We tested the B8850 on a wide variety of HP’s branded papers, as well as papers from Hahnemühle, Red River, Moab, Ilford and others. With most glossy papers, there was some gloss differential, but it was rarely extreme or distracting. If you’re planning on printing a lot of glossy images with the B8850, however, you’ll probably want to look for an alternative to HP’s Advanced Glossy paper. It has a flimsy feel to it, and exhibited more gloss differential than either of our current favorites, Moab’s Lasal Gloss and Red River’s UltraPro Gloss.

When printing on matte, fine art and fiber-based media, the B8850 did fairly well. You’ll have to pay close attention to paper weight and thickness, especially because not all vendors provide both pieces of information. Papers like Hahnemühle’s Photo Rag 180 and Moab’s Colorado Fiber Satine worked with the specialty tray just fine, but we got scratches from the printhead on the trailing end of prints on Ilford’s Gallerie Gold Fibre Silk, which, at 0.32mm thick, shouldn’t cause any problems.

Like its rivals Epson and Canon, HP is really focusing on offering a broad selection of media types for it’s advanced printers, and there were two that we thought were outstanding with the B8850: HP’s new Professional Satin Photo Paper (Amazon link), which has the feel of a fiber-based paper with minimal luster-style pebbling, and Artist Matte Canvas (Amazon link), which has a bright white finish to it.

[When looking at papers for the B8850 or B9180: stay away from HP’s Premium and Premium Plus papers. Even though you might think that they’re ok for use with the Vivera inks—which HP states on some of the boxes we’ve seen in stores—they are designed solely for dye-based inks.]

Black-and-white printing

The B8850 isn’t only for printing color images, however. With the additional gray ink, the printer does an excellent job with grayscale images. This is one of the benchmarks set by Epson’s groundbreaking Stylus Photo R2400 and Stylus Pro 4000, and very nearly a requirement for this class of printer.

When printing in grayscale, you have two options. You can use only the black and gray inks, which gives you an entirely neutral print, at the expense of some detail and tonal range. You can also print a grayscale image with all of the inks, which, depending upon the image, can give you slightly more dynamic range and detail. The danger in using color inks to produce a black-and-white photo is that the print can exhibit a slight color cast when it is viewed under different lighting conditions. We saw little evidence of this situation, which is also known as metameric failure, on our B8850. In reality, almost all of the B8850’s black-and-white prints held their own against prints from an Epson R2400, which has two light-density black inks in addition to the matte and photo black inks.

One side note regarding black-and-white printing: when you’re printing on matte or fine-art papers, the B8850 will use both the matte black and photo black inks, in addition to the gray ink. (We recently covered this, noting that it also works with the B9180, and the wide-format Designjet Z2100.)

With regard to print longevity, Wilhelm Research has posted preliminary print permanence ratings for the B8850 on HP media. They estimate that unframed color prints will last more than 100 years on most media types, and black-and-white prints over 200 years, with estimates even longer for prints framed under glass.

Paper handling

If the first generation B9180 had a weak spot, it was in its paper handling. The bottom-feed paper tray generally worked fine, although the guides for aligning different paper sizes were flimsy and hard to move. The specialty tray, while a good idea, was prone to misalignment, often causing paper to skew slightly at times. We also had quite a few instances of paper crimping when printing on thick media. To be fair, these were generally minor issues, but we know of at least one photographer who traded in his B9180 for a Stylus Photo R2400, preferring to go with better paper handling over the necessity of swapping matte and photo black inks.

To be honest, it’s hard to tell if HP has fixed all of the problems; we’ll need a lot more testing, and will want to hear from other folks with units in the field. The guides inside the paper tray are much improved; we didn’t feel like we were going to break them every time we changed the paper size. And we generally had better luck with the specialty media tray. We fed approximately 100 sheets of various sizes through the manual-feed tray with only a few problems: the aforementioned issue with the Ilford paper; issues with another paper that started to buckle as the ink coverage increased (leaving ink smears on the page); and a couple of skewed prints on paper that had been trimmed from letter-size. For us, that’s just the way things work—we think it’s the nature of this mechanism that it won’t always be perfect—and those instances are acceptable for us.

We had absolutely no problems with HP papers, however, and our advice would be to stick with the HP-branded papers and some of the better third-party glossy papers to start with. Be careful with experimentation, at least until you have a good handle on how the tray deals with the type (and sizes) of images you print.

Performance

At this level, performance is generally secondary to print quality and usability, but if your primary goal is to find an inkjet that will churn out high-quality prints in seconds, the B8850 probably isn’t going to be your first choice. When testing the printer up against the current set of printers in its price range—Canon’s Pixma Pro9000, and Epson’s Stylus Photo 1400 and R1800—the B8850 came up last. Again, it’s not a big concern to us; print quality is of prime importance, but if you like any of the other printers in its class, the B8850’s speed might make a difference for you.

Photosmart Pro B8850 print speeds (highest photo quality)

[All times in seconds; smaller is better. Print sizes in inches. Tests run from a MacBook Pro, with Mac OS X 10.5, Adobe Photoshop CS3. File resolution was 300 dpi at the print size. Three trials, averaged. Stylus Photo 1400 was unavailable for testing at highest quality setting.]

With regard to ink usage, we printed more than 200 photos before we started to run low on any ink. Depending on the type of work you do, you might find that you use a little more or a little less ink, but we think our usage is fairly typical. A full set of eight cartridges lists for $272, which is not insignificant, but the B8850’s 27ml cartridge volume is twice that of it’s competitors.

The B8850 vs. B9180

The B8850 uses the same print engine as the $700 Photosmart Pro B9180; HP’s intention was to build a less-expensive printer without some of the B9180’s bells and whistles. As a result, the B8850 lacks the B9180 LCD status display and Ethernet port, neither of which are crucial to us. The front panel of the B8850 has small status LEDs for each ink that turn on when the ink level in that tank is below 25%, and you can perform all maintenance tasks directly from your PC or Mac.

Where some users might want to go for the B9180 is in the media support: it will handle rigid media up to 1.5mm thick. We’ve found that most fine-art stocks come in lighter weights (180-235 gsm), and they work great with the B8850, but for people interested in a bit more heft, the B9180 (or one of the comparable Epson and Canon pro printers) is a better choice.

The B9180 also supports Electronics for Imaging’s Designer Edition RIP, which makes the printer an ideal proofer for a small design firm or workgroup. HP has said that the RIP will not be available for the B8850.

Is this the printer for you?

As we stated in our initial analysis, we think HP will sell quite a few of these printers. At that magic price hovering around $500 (which is where we expect the printer to be priced once the initial wave has passed), it offers some very enticing features: excellent print quality and color fidelity, great black-and-white output, a nice set of usability features, and is backed by a very solid group of papers available directly from HP. If you’re looking to mostly print glossy photos, we think that Epson’s Stylus Photo R1900 will probably be a better choice, but it’s going to be a close call. We can tell you that the Photosmart Pro B8850 does look like it will be a top contender when it ships this spring.

HP Photosmart Pro B8850 Professional Photo Printer (Q7161A#B1H)

Hewlett Packard, Electronics, $714.00