My experience with the R2400 is excellent. I had a 2200 and liked it
very much for consistency, reliability, quality. The 2400 surpasses it
in all these areas, with only one area on the 2200 better: the platen
release for printing on heavy papers. It is easier to assure alignment
of heavy art papers on the 2200 compared to the 2400, though the 2400
performs well with practice loading in the rear slot. In other respects
of speed, print quality, quietness, the 2400 is superior and gives me
the color gamut and quality I hoped for. The 2200 required some extra
work-arounds for some colors, and with some other colors was good but
not great no matter what you did.
You can use the stock profiles out of the box for good commercial
quality prints on certain Epson papers. You can get some free profiles
for art papers sold by Inkjetart.com that are very good, with good
linearity and excellent blacks, though some profiles are a bit dramatic
and "dump" shadow tones. And you can have one or two custom profiles
made for those papers you use most and for which you are most
demanding.
I don't see the need for a RIP unless you are printing combinations of
differently-profiled images and art in a page layout program such as
InDesign, and you really need the convenience, or really need to match
Pantone colors, or need SWOP certification.
I'd love to hear from the experts on this list as to how accurate a
desktop R2400 performs in SWOP simulation. If you convert to profile to
a good SWOP profile, then print converting relative colorimetric, or
absolute colorimetric with no borders, to a quality R2400 profile, how
accurate is it? If the gamut of the printer exceeds the SWOP gamut, I
would think that you would get a very accurate prediction for color on
press. That is my experience, but it is entirely seat-of-the-pants and
not measured colorimetrically. Any comments?
On Aug 29, 2005, at 8:11 PM, email@hidden
wrote:
Does anyone have opinion on less expensive
(or more expensive, if I don't get one immediately)
RIP for the 2400.
Or, would custom profiles for a couple of paper
choices
suffice?
Jeffrey Stevensen Photography
82 Gilman Street
Portland, ME 04102
207-773-5175
www.jsphotographs.com
email@hidden
