[Leica] My Epson Stylus Pro 3800 has arrived from Utah

[reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us (Brian Reid)]

Well, my wife wanted some grandchild pictures, so setting up the Epson 3800 
on her birthday ended up being a marriage-friendly activity.

The photographic quality of this printer is exactly what you want and expect 
it to be. I'm not going to say anything about that. What I want to report on 
is its systems engineering, which is absolutely top flight.

The automatic switching  between Photo Black and Matte Black is great. It 
decides which ink to use based on the paper that you tell it you are using 
(here's a screen dump of the MacOS paper select menu)

    http://reid.org/~brian/misc/e3800PaperMenu.png

This next screen dump will mean something to you MacOS types, PC folks are 
welcome to listen in.  A new entry in the print menu is "Supply Levels":

    http://reid.org/~brian/misc/e3800PrintMenu.png

(Never mind that it's in there twice; that hurts nothing except the 
programmer's pride). If you select it during the print dialog, here's what 
you get:

    http://reid.org/~brian/misc/e3800MacOS.png

Yup: you can check on ink levels before actually launching a print.

Because the printer is Ethernet connected, you can manage and configure it 
in a web browser. I kinda wimped out and used Bonjour to configure mine. I 
wanted to be hardass and use IPP, but I did have some wine with dinner.  And 
Bonjour just sort of works.

The network interface is at home with DHCP, DDNS (rather over the top, I'd 
say), and UPnP. I made a static DHCP entry for it and it got all of its 
config information from the DHCP server (which is how I like to do it).  
Once it's on the net, you do the rest in a browser:

    http://reid.org/~brian/misc/e3800netconf.png

This is a very nice printer and a very nice home-network component.

Brian