I didn't mean to say that we cannot criticize designs and wonder why they were made the way they were. I said I don't pretend to tell engineers how to do what they do. Engineers generally have good reasons why they do the things they do that are not obvious to us on the outside and cannot be … we don't have enough information to judge the engineers' decisions.
When something doesn't work, it's fine to criticize it. It's not sensible to obsess over perceived flaws in a design and spend all your energy crabbing about it, however, because the only person losing out by doing that too much is the person doing it. In my many years in high tech, the most consistent reasons why something didn't work the way I thought it ought to boiled down to the cost and time to do it better while still making deadlines and turning a profit. The second most consistent reasons were that I tend to use some things in ways that no marketing or functional requirements were ever written to consider. I can't be there to assist all engineering groups of all products that I use be sure that the marketing and functional requirements meet all my needs and uses. So it comes down to looking at what has been produced, for the most part, and figuring out how to get what I want out of it, despite whatever design issues it might have, and accepting some things as the "cost of doing business." I feel quite comfortable that I've done my bit in the (small) sphere of things that I actually had some influence on to make sure that they worked as they ought to. :-) Regards the notes on the Red River Paper site about ink usage in the switch over process, it's unclear whether that is the amount of black ink consumed in the process or whether that is the 'total' amount of ink used, since all ink cartridges do get some exercise in switchover and activation processes in my experience. If it's the total amount of ink used, 3ml distributed across eight 25 ml cartridges is about a 1.5% ink consumption hit for purging lines and optimizing printing. If it's what is lost solely from the black ink, it's a 12% hit, which seems quite a lot: that high a consumption isn't reflected in the ink status of the black ink cartridges before and after a switchover event on my printer, and I haven't seen anything to indicate otherwise that I had reduced the total number of prints I could make by that gross a number. Regardless, it is best to minimize black ink switchover to save ink. I print almost exclusively on matte surface papers, so I only switch over to Photo Black ink when I decide a particular set of prints will work better on the Epson Exhibition Fiber paper (a beautiful, deep semigloss paper) and bunch all my printing for that paper type up so that I switch over just twice—once to Photo Black and then back to Matte Black. I do this very rarely, it hasn't proven to be a major cost. The R2000 printer the article talks about is simply inappropriate for my needs since I print about 80% B&W and the R2000 is optimized for glossy surface printing; it lacks the full B&W inkset and the ABW control capabilities. The fact that there's a cost involved in switching inks in the P600 is mostly lost in the noise since with the bigger tanks and the practices of most photographers, switching blacks is something done relatively rarely: Most sophisticated photographers I know settle on two or three papers for the vast majority of their prints and learn how to get the most out of printing to those papers rather than changing papers all the time. Of course, it's in their best interest to pick papers that all use the same black ink type... :-) G > On Jul 2, 2019, at 12:45 PM, Igor PDML-StR <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Godfrey, thanks a lot for posting this quotation from the manual. > From that, I would agree with your conjecture of what Epson did. > > The last "Why" question was rather rhetorical. I understand that you > weren't the engineer who designed this printer. > > But I disagree with the sentiment that we cannot criticize engineers for what > they've done. … -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
