Category: Computing

The issue most people have with printers is the cost of ink, its not cheap and if all you are doing is printing documents from a spreadsheet or word processor then cheap third party inks are an option.

What about the high end photo printers, well thats a little different; while we all like to complain about the cost of ink it is how the company make their money.  The printers for what they are and what they do are really quite cheap now.

The higher end printers are a lot cheaper to run, while a consumer inkjet may have cartridges that contain as little as 18 ml of ink the high end start around 80 ml and go up to about 3/4 of a litre, they are far cheaper to run but still not cheap.

The question to ask yourself is why did you spend all that money buying an expensive high quality printer?  You wanted high quality prints.  That means good ink, good paper and lets not forget a fully colour managed workflow.  Whether you create your own icc profiles for the paper or you download the profiles the better paper manufactures have on there website.

The printer manufactures do spend millions developing their inks and papers and to get the best quality their ink is usually the best option.  There are a small number of specialist ink providers that offer specialist inks such as quad tone Black & White etc but these are very specialist items, in general your better off with the manufactures inks for best quality.

With paper I recommend going with companies that offer good support, you want documentation detailing what driver settings to use or what custom settings, e.g. what resolution to set, whether it supports Bidrectional printing or if its a slower to dry paper then single direction, colour density, paper tray and if you can get the information the platen gap, but that may have to be a guess.  If your using thick paper then you may need to change if from Standard to Wide.  The Epson 3880 has usefully named settings of Narrow, Standard, Wide, Wider and Widest!  Start with Standard and if you get a head strike which I did when testing the Tecco BP210 Buttenpapier, try Wide.

A printer that can print 17 inches wide has been on my wants list for quite a while now.  Having the flexibilty to print up to 17 inches wide in a desktop printer is very useful.  Unfortunately while the Epson Stylus Pro 3800 series is the smallest foot print wide format printer its still not exactly small so its been on the waiting list until we bought the new house.

If you check on Epson’s UK website and also other online retailers the price differs by as much as £300.  At the Photography show last Monday I visited Epson’s stand and had  a look at the Pro 3880 and the smaller R3000.

The R3000 is A3 the Pro 3880 A2+ and there is not a big difference in the physical size.  Running costs is also a consideration as is build quality.  For a consumer printer the R3000 is one of Epson’s better high end printers.  The build quality is very good and as good as the professional services models.  The running costs are another thing; while the R3000 has fairly large economical cartridges for a consumer inkjet printer at 28ml, the Epson 3800 series has 80ml cartridges for not much more.

Epson were not selling printers at the show but they did give me a card to take to one of their dealers who was at the show selling printers.

The show price was about as cheap as I had seen it on the internet, the difference being this was a well known supplier not an unknown company.

When you factor in the retail costs of the ink the printer only cost £370, but then who pays Epson retail costs for ink cartridges, I have seen them range from £30-£48 for the same Epson branded cartridge.

They did not have any of the printers at the show but were willing to sell me one at the very good show price and three days latter the postman delivered my shiny new Epson to me.

I have ordered a number of trial packs of paper from various companies including Epson and have selected a series of images that represent my style of work to test with.

I have also ordered a full set of new cartridges, with the first set needing about 20% of their capacity to prime the lines and print head and with the extensive testing I intend to do, I am not expecting the first set of ink to last long.

It has been a long wait but finally Apple released the new Mac Pro today.  Despite what people may tell you this is not a standard PC and no you cannot build one for $1000 despite what some people are claiming.

The high speed standard 265 GB SSD and processor come to more then that and then there is the EEC memory and the twin workstation class video cards.  No this is a workstation and if you spec up a similar class of workstation from Dell or HP you will see that this is a well priced and well spec’ed machine.

Of course you may be asking will I be getting one.  Well when I get round to next upgrading my cameras I will definitely need more horse power in the photography processing department.

So I see my future desktop needs either being met with a high spec MacBook Pro/Air or a maxed out Mac Mini.  We will have to see what updates are planned.  A Mac Mini is a little low spec’ed in the graphics department but processor and memory is a good choice.  A high end MacBook Pro is close to the price of a low end Mac Pro so I will not say never.

Difficult choice, if only Apple would produce a Mac Mini with decent graphics.

Still until then i’ll keep looking at the Mac Pro and dreaming.

Just a reminder, as my machine reminded me today, do regularly re-profile your displays.  Also remember to use your display for at least a few minutes to let it warm up before profiling as the colours can change in the first five or ten minutes until your monitor as fully warmed up.

I tend to re-profile every four weeks and my profiling software reminds me automatically when I need to get it done.

Why profile well check out one of my previous blogs https://brown-family.org.uk/profiles-screen/

I have had a busy day today working at home (loving the new monitor).  While I had the little Adobe reminder at the top of my screen it was not until tonight I checked to see what it was all about.  Well it turns out Adobe Lightroom V5.3 is out today.  Seems to be mainly new camera support so nothing new it actually interest me but good to see anyway.