bronzing verdict update 9800/7800/4800
I spent a lot of today at the Pacprint trade show. Epson were there with the Stylus Pro 4800, 7800, 9800, as well as the 4400, 7400 and 9400, 4000, 7600 etc. The new printers were all churning out prints - lots of very impressive prints, lots of very big prints, lots of different papers. Lots of Epson reps who were all very helpful.
I took a test print of mine down to compare and examined many prints as they were produced from the three 800 series printers. Also compared ultrachrome prints with ultrachrome K3 prints, same image, same paper, different ink/printer, side by side.
The bronzing verdict - when you have an ultrachrome print to compare it to (on the same paper type) - there is a HUGE improvement in the new printers with regards to bronzing. On some (non matte papers) it was very difficult to find any hint of bronzing at all.
I haven't printed on anything but matte for several years - and partly due to that may have jumped to conclusions last night with regards to bronzing when looking at the PSPP prints last night. Semigloss prints are a long way from matte.
If you have areas of the print where the highlights are completely blown, it remains no ink, no magic clear ink, nada, is laid down, so there's still that unfortunate patchy look on papers like PSPP at some angles looking across those areas. You still need to spray in that case if it bugs you - or better yet - tweak the file before hand so there is some data in the highlights or if using the Advanced Black and White printing option in the Epson driver, check the 'Highlight Point Shift' option in Advanced settings.
posted by Pete Walsh @ 9:14 PM 5 comments
At 9:45 PM, andrew said...
Pete,
I live in Melbourne, well Sunbury, and am contemplating moving from a 2100 to the 4800. I went to PacPrint, had a chat, grabbed some samples -- all very impressive. The cost of changing blacks -- around $AU40 -- bugs me slightly, but not enough to put me off buying the printer.
I do have one question, and it's one that you might be able to answer easily as you experiment: the advanced black and white mode prints grayscale directly from RBG. And it's good. But what if you want to simulate the effect of say, a yellow filter. Very roughly, for we use a Fred Miranda plugin for this, you might desaturate in Photoshop, then up the yellow channel and the clouds are magnificent. But will the advanced black and white mode render this any differently to the original colour image? Does it discard colour info or do something more akin to desaturation? Yeah, I know we could produce the pseudo grayscale in Photoshop and print in regular colour, but I imagine that, like QuadTone RIP, the B&W mode would seek to minimise the use of colour inks - and thence colour shifting -- whereas the regular colour mode would construct gray tones from the various CMY inks.
Badly put, but hopefully you understand what I'm asking.
andrew at andrewbarnett dot net
At 1:01 AM, Quentin said...
Its going to be interesting to see how ImagePrint improves (if it does) on the reduced bronzing and other issues.
This really is the key point for me. I already have metamerism free B&W using ImagePrint 6, but bronzing on my 7600 on non-matte papers is an issue. If bronzing is greatly reduced, then maybe I have a non-art paper workflow option that might just work should I purchase a 7800.
At 1:15 AM, Pete Walsh said...
I thought I had seen some very good ultrachrome B&W prior to this (by people truly into technical perfection) but seeing my own B&W 4800 prints, even at this early stage, and those being produced today by both Epson and stores getting up to speed on the 4800, side by side with original ultrachrome B&W - I've found it to be an amazing thing, chalk and cheese. Even just walking around with the prints side by side and watching how they behave. A lot of people are finally going to be producing great B&W inkjet prints on a whole range of materials.
At 8:59 PM, Scott Graham said...
Hi Pete,
Your comment about "chalk and cheese" comparing 4000 to 4800 B&W prints:
which paper was that on? glossy I presume? but which one.
Thanks
Scott
www.sgraham.com
At 11:31 PM, Pete Walsh said...
Hi Scott, sorry about the delay in replying. I can't remember honestly - I looked at so many prints that day and haven't had a whole lot of sleep the last week or so. It was a gloss, probably Epson's Premium Glossy. Oh.. reading that again, I was probably also including my own B&W prints on EAM. More coffee to aisle 1 :p
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