At 1:11 PM,  Anonymous said...

Hmm, technicaly no it is not a K3 print. Who knows what it might do to logevity it could be nothing to much more than we thought it ever could.

I am also looking into the phatte system and I have had this same question.

 

At 9:05 PM,  Terje L said...

Hi Pete,
I have been reading your Epson 4800 blog for a while and it has been very interesting. I purchased the 4800 printer myself in June this year, and we've been living quite happily together. However. switching black inks in and out became a real pain after a while, so finally I decided to get the ImagePrint RIP to be able to use the PhatteBlack solution. The results are far more than I expected. Not only do I save time (and money even though the RIP itself is expensive), the quality of prints is taken to a new level thanks to amazing profiles.

Regarding K3-printing I would say that of course Phatte printing is K3- printing as well. Better profiles, (better ink mixing) and skipping the light-light black lets you keep all the qualities from the new inks, but gives you even better results in both work flow and general print quality.

As Michael Reichman is explaining you can do the cartridge modification yourself. You need
a chip resetter (see the url at the and of this submission) and a light-light black chip. This one you can either by new, or just remove one from an old cartridge, reset it, and put it on the new
matte black cartridge. You have to switch the small "ID-plate" on the top as well to get it into the right slot. It's very easy and took me only two minutes the first time I tried.

http://www.moltengold.com/cgi-bin/eBzget6A.pl?shop=BroadMana39774&trolley=205190&page=http://www.printerowners.co.uk/epsonchipreset_cart.htm


The IP-RIP - Highly recommended !

Terje Lillehaug
Norway

 

At 11:25 AM,  Pete Walsh said...

Thanks for the info Terje.

I'm waiting to hear back from Epson regarding warranty implications of the Phatte Black system.

Also I would expect that printing with Phatte Black voids any longevity claims made by Epson, which are based on the full K3 inkset. Of course, who is to know, and does matter in practice? I think ColorByte will need to supply their own longevity info for Phatte Black.

 

At 3:37 PM,  Anonymous said...

Peter

I have been looking at the IP system as well. The demo that I got was very impressive. There have been a lot of issues with the shadows over inking on my 4800. IP fixed most of these. This demo was with the standard K3 ink set with matte black. The software was easy to use and made laying out multiple prints on a single sheet very easy.



My main concern with the Phatte black is I also have a contact printing program and that runs through the Epson driver, if I change the ink set then this will no longer work. The only way around it would be to print to a file and then print that through IP. This would be a real pain when you have a client waiting for the contact sheet. On the up side I could print on both Glossy and Matte stock with out having to change inks! I also agree with Terje the profiles supplied by IP are very good.



As for Epson saying anything they do is archival I tend to take that with a pinch of salt. A few years ago when they released their new 100 year ink for the 1290 I had prints in my studio visibly fading in 2-3 weeks!! The Epson rep came over and shuffled his feet a lot and more or less admitted that the ink was not quite as good as their advertising would like you to believe. Basically Epson is a paper and Ink seller, their 4800 is a great printer but the software does leave a lot to be desired.



Those are my thoughts for what ever they may be worth. Keep up the great blogg



Regards



Bruce Alexander

 

At 10:01 PM,  Pete Walsh said...

Hi Bruce, thanks for a great post!

I agree about taking longevity ratings (from any manufacturer) with a grain of salt but my point goes back to an incident where a print shop tried to take action against Epson when a customer took action against the print shop because prints started to discolor/fade. The prints were made on an Epson, using Epson inks but on non-Epson paper - end result is the print shop had no claim. So that's the angle I'm coming from - given Phatte Black is not the full K3 inkset it would seem to be that using it would void any of the longevity claims made by Epson re K3 prints.

In practical terms it might just as well be hot air - 'who cares' - I'll most likely be pushing daisies before then :)

 

At 2:37 PM,  Anonymous said...

Peter

I guess there's very few of us print on Epson papers, then we are all on our own a bit. I have since purchased the IP rip and it has been performing very well. There were some issues with the profiles for Epsom matte paper but these were resolved with color byte very quickly through their rep here in Australia. I have not yet changed over to the phattblack system, I am still trying to work out some workflow issues with this.

I think that a lot of of this hype about archival inks/papers has got a bit out of hand. I used to print my monochrome shots with the the pizography system and was obtaining fantastic results. In order to get a very dense black they were adding a black dye to the black pigment, unfortunately this changed colour, became walm, over a period of a few weeks, it then became stable. A lot of people got very upset at this phenomena and so they have now removed the dye. The snag is that the prints no longer have a wonderful velvety black they used to. My personal feelings about this are I would rather have my prints looking fantastic for 30 years than crappy for ever!

Reading your woes about the head blockage on the Epson 4800 I have been fortunate with this is not happening to me, but I do tend to use the machine when I need a print and this is not always every day, as I mentioned in an earlier post I stopped turning off my printers and just let them Sit at ready state, since I have adopted this practice there has been no more problems with the printer.

Regards

Bruce Alexander

 

At 2:31 AM,  John Saxon said...

Hi - I am a photographer in Dallas and just bought a new Epson 4800. I am very disappointed in the darkness of the black from the matte black ink on matte paper. My good old 1280 produced much darker and richer blacks. Has anyone else noticed this problem? I'm planning on getting rid of the printer if I can't find some solution. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks, John Saxon

 

At 8:17 AM,  Anonymous said...

Hi Pete

I need some help picking a printer for my course work at university. I'll be using the printer for both glossy and matte prints. From reading your review there seems to be a big problem with the cartridge changing. Is it possible to use the glossy black on matte papers?

Thanks Ian

 

At 6:40 PM,  Agent7 said...

To understand what this all means, we need to go back to the world, before the new printers and inks. The previous generation Epson was a 7 ink printer that had 8 cartridge slots. This meant that you could have both the Photo Black and the Matte Black inks loaded at the same time.

=====================
davis
Epson T060

 

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