Re: Hi-Fi inksets
Re: Hi-Fi inksets
- Subject: Re: Hi-Fi inksets
- From: Robert L Krawitz <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2004 22:08:31 -0500
From: "Cris Daniels" <email@hidden>
Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2004 21:41:04 -0500
I wouldn't be so quick to write-off the light cyan and light
magenta inks. I'd much rather have the diluted inks around to
enable a better grayscale (ala ImagePrint) while using color
inks. Its one thing if Epson adds red and blue ink (like Colorspan
has done for years) but to chuck the light inks is bad, and the
R800 has no light black either, the grayscale output is going to be
dreadful. The people I've talked to at Epson Prographics are not
enthused, and I can't see how Epson could sell a 10 position ink
cartridge printer. If they made the 4000 a 10 ink printer you'd be
talking about a grand just to buy a backup set of 2200ml inks for a
$1695 printer. I would also want to see some real gamut plots, two
reputable people I've talked to have mentioned a very slight
increase in gamut, certainly not enough to justify loosing the
smoothness of the diluted inks, at 30"x40" you will notice things
you don't see on the snapshots from the R800. I had CMYKOG inks in
my Mutoh RJ6100 (driven by Wasatch) and it was really much too
rough compared to its CcMmYK configuration.
The drop size is just as important as the light ink. Very small drops
of dark ink get averaged out to look like bigger drops of light ink.
The smallest drop size offered for the R800 is 1.5 pl, compared to 4
pl for the 2200 and friends. That's roughly equivalent to 4.5 pl if
light inks were available, or 3 pl for the gray ink in the 2200 (since
it's only about 1/2 as dark, rather than 1/3 as dark for the cyan and
magenta).
I would actually expect a better grayscale from the R800, due to the
simpler ink configuration. The hues of the light inks don't always
match perfectly, and when the inks blend and drops overlap things
become very non-linear and you get slight color shifts in the
grayscale.
However, this only applies if you can actually use the smallest drops
(Epson recommends using them only at 1440x1440 and 2880x1440). If you
can't use such small drops, you're obviously going to do better with
the light inks. At 720 DPI, the 2200 is able to use its smallest
drops, while the R800 uses the largest non-economy drops (I don't
remember offhand what those are, but the smallest drop size in this
set is probably on the order of 6 pl). That wouldn't even match the
old Stylus Photo EX!
What Epson doesn't tend to say is what kind of resolution you need to
get an acceptable print. For example, the Stylus Photo 960 sounds
very impressive with its 2 pl drops, but you can only use those at
2880x1440 DPI, and since the color inks don't seem to produce
particularly good grays, there needs to be a lot of black ink. At
lower resolutions, the smallest drops you can get are 4 pl, and due to
the seemingly inferior inks, the quality isn't very good (either you
have to use a lot of black ink, and therefore get large black drops,
or you have very poor grayscale quality). The 2200, on the other
hand, works very well indeed at a mere 720 DPI, where we can use its 4
pl drops just fine. The combination of the light black ink and the
fact that the UltraChrome inks produce very strong grayscale allows
for a very smooth grayscale.
My guess is that the R800 will do very well at 1440x1440 DPI, and if
the UltraChrome ink formulations really are the same, probably a bit
better than the 2200. Since it has about twice as many nozzles as the
2200, and can print 720 dots per inch per pass (vs. only 360 on the
2200), the printing time at 1440x1440 should be comparable to that of
the 2200 at 720 DPI, although it will be much more demanding on the
software. It will not be a good printer at lower resolutions, so
you'll need a fast computer (or more time) to take advantage of this.
The 2200 has an excellent gamut as it is. I've been able to get very
vivid blues and reds from it already, unlike the 960, which appears to
have an awful gamut (the 2200 also appears to have more gamut than the
870 and friends). What I'd personally prefer to see is more gamut
extension in the green; it's very hard to get a vivid light green out
of any of these printers. If/when I get my hands on an R800 I will be
most interested indeed to see what it can do.
--
Robert Krawitz <email@hidden>
Tall Clubs International --
http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail email@hidden
Project lead for Gimp Print --
http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net
"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton
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