Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote:
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.
Not an issue with the R220, this problem is specific to the 13" and
larger printers which run tubes from the carts to the head rather than
having the carts on top of the head. One head clean and your good with
the R200 and R220. And that's a lot less than 20% of the ink. The MIS
carts are also refillable, and the ink is much cheaper in bulk. UT2 is
$55 for a set of refillable carts for the 1270 btw.
- 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.
The 1270, 1280 and 1290 were notorious for head clogging issues when
running pigment ink (Standard inks were dye). The 2200 and later wide
format, and the C8x and R2x0 printers don't have these issues when
running pigment 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.
Documentation is a little sparse for QTR. However, the workflow for the
R200 and R220 with the MIS EZ dedicated inksets uses the Epson driver,
not QTR by default. You can use QTR if it pleases you.
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
The R2400 is definitely as good for output. But it isn't cheaper when
compared to current MIS costs (Especially if you get a chip resetter and
refill)
-Adam
- Re: Epson printers Adam Maas
-
