March 14, 2007 The Arrival of the Printing Beast

I recently received an Epson 3800 medium format printer. If you are not into photography or printing, you might want to skip this blog entry. It might get a bit geeky, boring and lame if you are not a serious photo junky.

I have been getting paid for taking pictures part time for a couple of years now and have struggled with the best way to get the images to the customer. At the beginning, I was printing at home on my Canon i9100 and i960 inkjet printers. The problem with these printers is that they use dye ink. Now, the dye inks give wonderful, vibrant images, but at the expense of fading. Pigment inks give longevity on par with and sometimes exceeding traditional lab prints, but for years, pigment inks could not produce the same vibrant images and the pigment printers were prone to clogging. So, I decided it might be easier to outsource my professional printing needs and online labs like mpix.com got the bulk of my business. I was not entirely happy with this process though, as it took some of the control out of my hands and ate into my profits.

Then Epson launched the 3800. Epson promised, and reviews seemed to confirm, that the new inkset in this printer, the K3 Ultrachrome Inks, are as vibrant as dye and are virtually clog free. So, when I had a chance to put some of my profits back into my business, I ordered the 3800.

The 3800 is capable of printing up to 17 inches wide and 37 inches long (and longer if you want to buy the Imageprint RIP--but at $800 I'll pass for now). Thus, at 17 inches wide, it is not really a wide format printer, which generally are able to print 24" or wider, so I would call it a medium format printer.

Bottom line on the printer is that I would highly recommend it for anyone who wants to print seriously nice images at home and want to make big prints.

The printer is a beast and like all printers, it arrives with about 1000 pieces of blue tape holding down all it various parts to avoid shippng damage due to any unwanted movement and your challenge is to find them all and remove them. That was actually harder than installing the software and getting my first print.

The printer houses 9 ink cartridges that each hold 80 ml of ink. Since most inkjet cartridges hold about 10-13 ml of ink, you can see that this baby holds a lot of ink. At about $50/cartridge, they are not cheap, but they are more economical than the smaller cartridges. How much can you print with these cartridges before you have to ante up and buy more? Apparently quite a bit.

I had a job to print about 60 12x18 posters for a local middle school and in addition to those posters, I've printed a dozen or s0 8 1/2 x 11 images and a few 8 x 10, 5 x7's, etc and two ink cartridges now report about 25-35% remaining and the rest of them show more than 75% remaining. This, despite reports that there is a significant amount of ink drawn out of the cartridges when you first start up the printer to prime the lines that run from the cartridge to the print head. So, it looks like I will be able to print quite a bit before I have to buy more ink.

The image quality is superb and definitely rivals anything my i960 or i9100 could produce. The printer ships with about 10 sheets of Epson's highly acclaimed premium luster paper and it is very nice. In fact, I've ordered 25 sheets of this paper in the 17 x 22 size to make some gorgeos 16 x 20 prints. The Epson standard profile for this paper is very good and what I see on my screen is what I get in the print, which is exactly what you should get in a good, color-controlled workflow.

The luster paper is very similar to the Ultra Pro Satin (UPS) paper sold by redriverpaper.com. Redriver offer their own profile for the UPS paper, but I've found that simply using the Epson profile for their luster paper provide a more vibrant and more accurate color. I have ordered some additional sample papers to do some more experimentation with. I'll have to fill you in on how that goes at a later date.

One of the real disadvantages of the Canon printers have been their inability to produce good black and white images. Epson and HP have been including a few different shades of black and gray inks and this effort has really paid off. The 3800 holds 9 different ink cartridges and 4 of them hold black or gray ink. They are: Photo Black (for luster and gloss images), Light Black, Light Light Black and Matte Black (for matte prints). After printing my first B&W image, I can say that whatever Epson is doing, they are doing it right. The first print came out perfect. Not some almost B&W with a hint of blue or red that my Canon always produced.

I still want to print a few images on the 3800 and compare them with the same prints I made on the Canon printers so as I can do a direct comparison, but my first impression is that I will give the edge to Epson and if you factor in the fade factor, Canon will lose.

My neighbor's son plays for the local high school baseball team and since he is the booster in charge of tickets, he's given me a free season pass (Nick gets in free anyway) in exchange for some pix of his son and his teammates. I can't wait to show him a 16x20 of his son. He'll flip out. I am also anxious to do a couple of Nick and Sarah at that size.

Anyway, getting back to my workflow for getting the prints to the customer. I've started using Photoreflect's software to sell my pictures online. It works something like this:

1. I take images and create a web gallery with the Photoreflect software and upload images to their server.

2. Customer goes online, views pictures, buys pictures and submits order along with payment.

3. Photoreflect sends me the order.

4. I print and send the order.

5. Photoreflect sends me a check for the order minus their 15% commision (the software and image hosting are free).

By being able to print the customers images locally, I can do it as cheap as the online stores and can ensure quality control before delivery to the customer.

Now, if you don't want to pony up the cash for a large printer like this and don't really need to print large, you should look at the 3800's little brother, the 1400. But if you do a large volume of printing, the economics of the 3800 are a bit better.