These inks gave birth to the new, industry-approved term for inkjet prints: pigmented prints. Many fine-art printers consider Ultrachome inks to be one of the most significant advancements to inkjet printing.
The C80 was a letter-size desktop printer however Ultrachrome inks are now found on the 12” wide Epson 2200, the new 17” wide Epson 4000, the 24” wide 7600 and the 44” wide 960. Durabrite inks were pigment based, had a higher fade-resistance than previous Epson inks and did not exhibit metamerism. These were the precursors to the now famous Epson Ultrachrome inks. This migration is based on how well these new features are received by the public and on how well they work in real world printing.Ī few years ago I purchased and tested the then-new Epson C80. Some of these new features are later implemented on their larger printers. This printer, which is now just becoming available in stores, features a number of new technological breakthroughs in regard to print quality.Įpson regularly introduces new, cutting edge printing features on their desktop printers.
The software bundle includes a useful RAW Print utility, which can read RAW image formats from supported cameras, while the Darkroom Print allows you to quickly correct images.In February 2004 Epson introduced a new desktop printer: the Epson R800. Wilhelm rates prints on Glossy Photo paper at over 100 years. However, when the nozzles work, photos will last longer than you will. Both the R800 and R1800 required nozzle cleaning, as entire colours were missing from prints, even though we’d only printed several 6 x 4in photos since the last print-head clean. One problem we experienced during testing was blocked nozzles. Colour graphics on plain paper are as good as any, and our mono quality test on coated paper had good contrast. Text quality is fine, and in draft mode is churned out at 9.4ppm.
All these problems can be alleviated by manually adjusting colour in the easy-to-use driver, but it’s worth noting that the HP 8750 produced accurate tones straight out of the box. Red was also too pink, and this led to the guard’s uniform not being red enough. On a technical level, the general sharpness and level of detail in photos was fine, but the blocks of colour were under-saturated, particularly yellow.
The mono photo suffered from the extra blue, making it look cold and losing some detail in highlights.
An excess of magenta and cyan meant that the baby’s skin tones were a touch anaemic, while the lips were decidedly purple instead of pink. However, place them side-by-side with the iP99’s and you’ll easily notice the differences. In isolation, the R1800’s photomontage prints are great. It took just over two-and-a-half minutes to print our A4 photomontage and almost two minutes more for an A3 version. Using the included Easy-PhotoPrint application (which is considerably more convenient than printing from Photoshop), we saw the R1800 print a 6 x 4in photo in one minute, 25 seconds – not as quick as the iP9950, which was 48 seconds faster. The R1800 isn’t exactly compact, though with the paper trays extended, it measures 613 x 780 x 459mm (WDH). At the rear are USB 2 and FireWire interfaces, and we like that the PSU is integrated, unlike the HP’s external unit, which seems slightly unnecessary given the unit’s gargantuan dimensions. Thanks to the flip-down front panel, you can print directly onto CDs and DVDs – something the HP 8750 can’t do. Buttons on the right-hand side let you cancel jobs, feed roll paper through and change ink tanks, but that’s it in terms of controls. There isn’t even a PictBridge port on the front. As you’d expect from a printer that’s aimed at the semi-pro market, there are no card readers or TFT on the front – Epson knows that the target audience are much more likely to edit and print photos from Photoshop.