[Leica] Printer Purgatory

[pklein at 2alpha.net (Peter Klein)]

I've just wasted another evening and about $15 worth of ink dealing with a 
print head Clog From Hell. My Epson 1280 printer with MIS Ultratone 2 
grayscale inks produces beautiful B&W prints--when it works. But I've just 
about had it with the periodic clogs, banding and mysterious goings-on.  I 
just had to flush out my print heads with a special cleaning cartridge, 
put cleaning fluid on the pad that the heads rest on, and hope that that 
clears it.

Part of the problem is using the pigmented MIS inks on a printer designed 
for dye ink. There are other issues. My workflow with the Paul Roarke 
curves worked beautifully for several years, then stopped working when I 
changed to a new cartridge, and hasn't worked since. Fortunately, the 
"easy way" method still works, so I've been using that. But why this 
happened has never been explained.

I have two printers.  I used the 1280 for color for a while, then 
dedicated it to B&W.  I got an Epson R200 for a song, and dedicated that 
to color. Neither printer ever gave me WYSIWYG color.  The Epson-provided 
profiles (I've downloaded several) don't work with Epson's own papers. 
Always much too dark.  I've had to resort to manually creating curves that 
work with some slider settings I downloaded from the Norman Koren site.

All in all, it's feels like time to think about another printer. Here are 
my requirements:

1.  I do a lot of B&W, so my printer must print B&W well.  A later Epson 
printer (designed for pigmented ink) with either its own grayscale inks or 
MIS would be OK.  But I'm not wedded to Epson if another company has a 
better solution.

2.  I just want the printer to work. If I send it a profiled grayscale 
file, and tell it to print grayscale, it should produce a print that looks 
like what I see on my profiled monitor.  Ditto color.  I understand that 
perfection requires customization.  But I don't want to have to spend 
weeks tweaking curves and profiles just for decent basic performance.

3.  A printer wider than letter-size is nice, but it's not an absolute 
requirement.  I rarely print bigger than 8.5 x 11.  If the best printer 
for me has a letter-sized carriage, I can always outsource the few big 
prints I do per year. On the other hand, if a bigger printer means bigger 
cartridges that don't need changing as often, that might be better.  Cost 
of consumables matters, too.

4.  The high-end, $1000-plus printers are really not an option.  I don't 
print enough to justify them, just as I didn't print enough to justify 
cartridge refilling or a continuous flow system.  So we're talking a $100 
- $800-ish printer.

I have heard that many people get good results with MIS inks and the Epson 
R200 or R300.  If that's a good way to go, I could always revert back to 
color with the 1280 and convert the R200 to B&W.  But if I'm just going to 
get more clogs, forget it, I might as well try something else.

Advice welcome!

--Peter