At 10:38 AM, Ted said...

Pete, I’ve been following your report on 4800. I just received R2400 and am really impressed with its output quality. I too am coming from 2200 and have no regret making this upgrade. Lacking of bronzing and reduced GD alone was worth the upgrade.

I have a quick question. I am trying to figure out the best way to do BW. I've printed a number of BW photos using both color mode and Advanced BW. All the photos had already been converted to BW in PS. The prints I am getting on EPSG and EEM look slightly more greenish than the absolute neutral tone I see on my color managed monitor. I haven't played much with the settings yet and will do so in the coming days. I remember you settled on converting to BW first then printing in Color Mode, do your prints match exactly the screen color or is this something that you have to adjust by eyeballing? I have X-Rite Pulse Spectrometer System coming in a few days, so I will be making some custom profiles, but at least for now, I wanted to give the canned profiles a run. Let me know what your experience is. And thank you for sharing your thoughts on this page. I think this has been the most thorough and non-biased printer review I have ever read. Cheers.

 

At 1:46 AM, Pete Walsh said...

Hi Ted, thanks, your welcome, the blog has been fun. I'm going to continue doing it - just a little busy this week.

The match for me is pretty close, close enough for me to be comfortable with it - taking into account a monitor image is always going to look a little different to a printed image.

I haven't as yet made any adjustments specifically to correct differences in the print vs monitor - I haven't seen the need to. I'm still not 100% decided on the Color vs Adv B&W for B&W prints... it's a close thing. The differences in ink usage is food for thought.

Like I mentioned in the other post, my custom profiles have made the prints a little more neutral, but really without something compare it to the canned prints were good, as in I'd be happy to sell them. If you're going th Adv B&W route they (profiles) are not relevant anyway.

Hope it goes well with the X-Rite. I would love to have that capability myself.

 

At 3:15 AM, volker said...

Hi Pete,
As promised a short report on changing from Photo black to matt.Well, the 4800 won! When the "Out of ink" sign appeared I just replaced the Photo black and hoped. The 4800 said simply "Wrong cartrige". I tried to switch the printer off checked the menu but did not get anywhere.
Then I tried the South african method. Unfortunately the menu settings in the software seam to apply only for the 9600 I couldn't find them. So after awhile I gave up.
The next step was to use` the official method. Now the 4800 hit back. When I started the normal change over procedure the 4800 complained about "not enough ink" in 3 of the other colours. These were pretty close to empty, but the "low ink message" had not yet appeared. To cut a long story short I had to replace the old cartidges and then the change over went well.
Being back on matt is nice, mainly because I am used to matt from the 2100 but I must say I did enjoy the prints on lustre very much. But since I can't afford changing blacks all the time I will stick with matt for the forseeable future. I find the colours of the 4800 quite a lot better (subjectively) than the colours of the 2100. They are much more saturated with the paper I am using.

 

At 3:30 AM, Ted said...

Pete, thank you for the reply. After some comparison, I think I will stick with Color Mode BW. Advanced BW is simply too limiting unless I am feeding a color image straight into the ABW driver. My conclusion on the green hue is that the canned profiles on R2400 are not quite robust. I am still seeing quite a difference between the screen and the actual print. I will see how much improvement a custom profile will make. Beside this green tint issue, I love r2400 and highly recommend it to anyone coming from previous UC printers.

 

At 5:34 AM, David Miller said...

Hi Pete,

I've been reading the contents of your blog since late last week. I had an 4800 on order (my first LARGE-style Epson) since a week ago, and the business about the black ink swap was almost enough to get me to reconsider.

(As background: I write printer profiling software. This won't be my first experience using larger Epson printers, but it's my first go-round at actually purchasing and setting one up to use here at my home office.)

But then I also discovered that the 2400 also has only 8 slots, and that the same black-swap issues apply, although it would mean smaller amounts of ink wasted. And I really don't want to be limited to printing 13" wide anymore, so: off we still go with the 4800.

The 4800 was just delivered today, and I've been through the unpacking process. My question: WHERE is the "exhaust port cover"? It's the only supposedly included piece that I can't find. Its only purpose seems to be to deflect the fan exhaust coming out the back, so that it goes to the side instead of straight back. Assuming that you did get one, (or anyone else reading here), can you remember where it was in all of the packing materials? (I've been through everything in the box at least once and now I'll have to look again). Do you see any issues running the printer without out? (I haven't plugged it in yet)

A question on the black inks. It's not clear to me yet whether you really -must- start up with photo black rather than matte, the first time around. The Premium Luster pack they include with the printer seems to be used for the first alignment, so that means you need Photo Black installed; and then you'd have to switch to Matte and dump some ink. (I have an additional set of carts on order (should show up in a day or so) and I doubled up on the Matte black so I'd have two of them, but at the moment I only have the included inks to work with).

Keep up the great work in maintaining your blog, it's been an invaluable source of early information on the 4800!


David Miller

 

At 6:04 AM, Anonymous said...

there was a thread on dpreview about the
exhaust port and it looks like nobody
got it...

I for sure didn't get one either..

and it looks like people haven't been
successful with the south african ink
swap method, as they weren't able to
find the corresponding menu entry...

 

At 8:16 AM, David Miller said...

Thanks; I just got off the phone with Epson support, and they said that it's not necessary and that it didn't ship with any of the 4800's. So much for that; the documentation was wrong.

It's a shame that the documentation isn't equally wrong about how much ink it (vaguely) implies is used when you swap the blacks...:-) (sigh)

I'm going to live with this is a necessary evil and just try to avoid swapping much. I'm -really- hoping that someone will come up with a "South African" alternate procedure for just putting in the other cart and letting the black ink work it's way out through the lines without affecting anything else. I can see this as a pretty effective alternative; just do the swap "early" and keep printing with whatever black ink is still in the lines, until you can see the changeover in one of the prints. It would seem to me that the worst that happens here (always) would be that you'd end up with one bad print to throw away (maybe two?); and the cost of one or two prints (even if large ones) vs. the cost of the wasted ink using the standard "Swap" procedure would be fairly negligible.

You would -think- that there -is- a way to do this, and that some enterprising person will dig a little deeper and figure it out. (and post the results!)

Volker: It sounds like you took a slightly "off" stab at this to begin with, by just putting in the wrong black cart. I wonder if that might have had anything to do with your lack of success after that?

(Anyone): What happens if you try the "South African" procedure to get the thing into Maintenance Mode 2? (Which is -not- the same thing as standard maintenance mode, which doesn't contain the special commands). This doesn't work at all? (I can't try this yet because I haven't powered mine up and charged the heads yet; I have Matte Black on the way and I'm considering starting off with that, instead of Photo black, to do my initial set of prints for the purposes of building some custom profiles and comparing to the "standard" profiles). Is it that there is no "MM2" on the 4800; or that it shows up but doesn't contain the necessary commands?


David Miller

 

At 9:11 AM, scott Graham said...

the black swap is about 94ml of ink---it dumps the black only, but recharges all 4 lines on that side. Saves hardware, pumps?, and complexity and expense at the sacrifice of ink I guess.

Scott

 

At 9:35 AM, stephen best said...

"I have Matte Black on the way and I'm considering starting off with that"

I loaded my 4800 with MK initially and haven't bothered with the PK that came with the printer. No problems.

 

At 10:17 AM, David Miller said...

(Stephen):

Great! The MK carts showed up today, so I'll go with them first and save the PK for later.

Now, the -next- question. Head alignment. Who's done that? Is it necessary, straight out of the box? (And who writes these cryptic Epson manuals, which tell you, vaguely, to do certain things but don't clearly tell you "why"?). From the reference guide:

"Aligning the print head: To prevent deterioration of print quality caused by misalignment of print head, align the print head before you start printing your data".

Does imply that the heads should be aligned once, when the printer is used for the first time, or should you wait until you start to suspect that there's something not right about the alignment? (why would this happen; and how can you tell when alignment might be necessary, by looking at prints?). It would be useful for them to expand on this here, and possibly show you what output would tend to look like if the heads were misaligned.

Then the following info on aligning the heads makes you think that alignment has something to do with the thickness of the paper (since you have to enter thickness when doing auto alignment); but it doesn't seem likely, as you might then think you'd need to align the heads every time you switched papers.

I'm thinking too much. I should just throw in the carts and plug the thing in and see what happens.


David Miller

 

At 12:34 PM, Nill Toulme said...

I did the alignment using the printer's control panel. It's fairly painless although it's done in three steps, each taking about eight minutes.

It doesn't seem to have done any harm. ;-)

Nill
~~
www.toulme.net

 

At 12:35 PM, Nill Toulme said...

p.s. I should add that I was so flummoxed after doing my first two prints with the paper wrong side up that I felt I should do something to atone. Alignment seemed like the right thing...

Nill
~~
www.toulme.net

 

At 12:48 PM, David Miller said...

1. Discard the previous rant on documentation. The actual printed manual is better than the .pdf that I was looking at, which I'd downloaded from somewhere else. Somebody obviously improved it. (You only need to do the alignment when you see banding or other kinds of artifacts).

2. Wrong side up!!! :-) I'll have to remember that, so I don't do the same thing.


David Miller

 

At 10:26 PM, Pete Walsh said...

WOAH! I wish the blogger implementation of comments was better!

Volker, thanks so much for the info regarding trying to shortcut the black changeover. Looks like we'll have to wait until someone figures out an updated SA method.

Having printed more images now on the 4800 (that I've also printed many times on the 2100) I definitely prefer the 4800 prints. I don't the color a lot 'better' but overall the prints are much cleaner, hard to describe, but especially noticeable in the lighter tones.

Regarding the exhaust port cover, I didn't see anything like that in box. I wasn't aware its existence on the 4000 until I saw a thread on it today on dpreview. Aah, cool I see your post further down the thread. Bummer that there is some confusion about the port cover!

Re the blacks, wouldn't it be a problem though if you swapped the blacks and kept printing in as much as the printer would know the blacks are swapped, and at the very least change the options available in the driver? My solution for now is to stick to matte black/matte papers - there's a bunch of stuff I'd like to explore on matte and that'll take a couple of months.

Re head alignment, I haven't done it and haven't seen the need to i.e. none of the following:

"If you find misaligned lines or black or white banding on the printed data, you may be able to solve these problems by using the Print Head Alignment utility to align the print head."


The start up procedure doesn't include head alignment as a step - I guess that fits in with the automatic head alignment feature in the specs:

---------------------

Automatic Print Head Alignment Technology

* Built-in sensor reads printed data for highly precise alignments of all color channels
* Aligns both single and bi-directional print modes.

---------------------

 

At 10:28 PM, Pete Walsh said...

Nil I've printed a couple on the wrong side too! Especially on some of the cut sheet papers it's hard to tell - I guess that is one benefit of buying rolls :)

 

At 5:04 AM, scott Graham said...

The automatic head alignment refers to the machine doing it WHEN you ask it to, not that it does it "every now and then" automatically.

i.e. you no longer have to print a test file, examine it with a loupe, and type in numbers.

On the 4000 they recommended doing it at startup for sure (shipping could rattle something?) and periodically there after.

Scott

 

At 1:24 PM, Pete Walsh said...

Thanks Scott. It's interesting then that the initial startup doesn't recommend running an alignment. Not that I've seen mentioned anyway - does it mention that in the printer guide?

 

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