[Leica] Printer Purgatory

[jayanand at gmail.com (Jayanand Govindaraj)]

Peter,
Just buy a 2400 and use it for both colour & black and white with Epson K3
inks. Its terrific, and ABW works very well
Cheers
Jayanand


On 6/14/07, Peter Klein <pklein@2alpha.net> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
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