I'm inspired to respond to this this morning because I happened to
meet Roy Harrington (author of "QuadToneRIP") last night at a gallery
opening. I had my ancient Epson 1270 fitted with MIS UT-2 inks for
several years, driven by QuadToneRIP. It produced lots of extremely
high quality B&W prints for me. But there are downsides:
- Swapping ink cart sets between B&W and color is impractical and
very expensive. You waste about 20% of the ink in a set each time you
swap when you try to clear it, and a set of UT2 ink carts is almost
$90, a set of standard Epson carts about $50.
- I had problems with consistency of settings and clogging between
batches of the MIS inks. They were far far better than the earlier
Piezography inks, but nowhere near as reliable as the standard Epson
inks.
- I never really felt like I was in full control of the printing
system. I discussed this with Roy, I feel his way of blending inks
for different tonal qualities is fine but the controls are confusing
and confusingly documented.
Switching to the R2400, the standard Epson driver and inks are
producing prints of equal to better quality with absolute
consistency, and at a lower price too.
Godfrey
On Feb 5, 2006, at 1:11 PM, Adam Maas wrote:
If you want good, cheap B&W for letter-size or smaller, get an R220
and the MIS inkset. You lose the ability to print colour without
ink swapping, but an R220 is well under $100USD, and the inkset is
around $60 (Refillable with the addition of a chip resetter).
