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9812 November/December
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9812 November/December
November/December 1998
EPSON COLOR PRINTERS
Why I Love Epson Printers
Ever since I beta tested the first Epson Stylus Color printer, I have written that it's high resolution and piezo electric technology produces awesome results with all color graphics and especially with photo-realistic pictures of faces. (See below for a description of the difference between piezo electric and the thermal drop-on-demand technology used by other manufacturers of inkjet printers)
__ The Epson image quality has gotten better with every new model and no other color printer comes close to its quality of output. It even has better color accuracy and detail in highlights and shadows than traditional photographic prints. If you use photo quality glossy paper, people do not know the Epson prints are not photographic prints, except that they ask where you got such wonderful photo processing.
__ The new six-color, 1440 dpi Epson Stylus Photo printers produce even more awesome images, especially of faces. (See below for an explanation of six-color vs. traditional four-color CMYK.)Poblems with Epson Printers
Epson Driver Problems The drivers for the Epson color printers have improved- from absolutely terrible to merely awful.
__ The Epson drivers are difficult to get set up to work and are given to inexplicable fits of temperament that cause freezes, crashes, and the gobbling up of a whole stack of expensive paper to print some random lines of gibberish on each page.
To have an Epson driver work at all, it needs its own free RAM, apart from the application it is printing out of. For large graphics files I leave Epson drivers 36 meg of free RAM.
__ Epson drivers only seem to work with Background Printing turned on. Epson drivers can get very irritable if they are not using the modem port, which is their default, rather than the printer port.
__ The driver on the CD that comes with the printer may be out of date so be sure to check Epson's Web site for the latest drivers, as they may have squashed some of the bugs.
__ Note: The driver for the new Stylus Photo EX does not warn you when the image is larger than the paper, it just clips the image.Epson Mechanical Problems
Epson's high end 1520 large format printer has a design flaw in the solid molded structure of printer that causes sheets put into the manual feed to go down on the outside of the printer rather than into the slot leading to the rollers.
__ Many months ago, I wasted an hour and a half on a toll call with technical support over the manual feed problem on the 1520, before I myself figured out that there was a misalignment between the structural parts, and there was no way it could be adjusted.
__ As of the Autumn of 1998, Epson Repair Service said there was no fix for this problem, and it had not been put (deliberately?) in the technical support data base.
You can use the 1520 manual feed if you look up underneath and manually place the leading edge of the paper into the slot where the rollers are.
__ You can also print a large sheet via the stack load tray, if you hold up the overhang until the sheet begins to feed.
__ The sheet feed is not very reliable, with a habit of grabbing more than one page in a staggered feed, and reporting paper out when paper is there and properly loaded. It will almost always cause problems if there is only one sheet of paper in th tray.
__ By the way, the ink-out light begins flashing when there is still enough ink left to print several full pages with photo-realistic ink coverage. When the ink does run out, the printing stops, you install a new cartridge, and it finishes the page without any visible sign. With Epson ink cartridges so costly, I wait until the ink actually runs out to replace the cartridge.
__ You can check the ink levels in the Utilities of the printer driver, but I have found that accessing this can cause the printer to go into one of its fits of feeding through every sheet in the stack and putting a few random lines of type on each.Epson Technical Support And Repair Service
Epson Technical Support I get more e-mails for help with Epson printers than all other products put together.
__ Live technical support used to be unreachable on Epson's 800 number, but now they have a toll number 312 974-1038 on which you can get through to a real person within a few minutes, (which you must do to get an Repair Authorization number.) The Epson 800 442-2100 number is now just fax back providing basic information, but you can get through on it.
__ Epson's tech support people are very pleasant and patient, but they are at a loss if your problem is not in their data base. Known problems for which Epson does not have a fix do not seem to be in the tech support data base (see above), wasting hours of customer time and toll costs.
Epson Repair ServiceEpson's warranty provides for free UPS Air shipping to their center in Indiana, and a return within a couple of days. Unfortunately when I shipped my 1520 for several problems, it came back with the sheet feed mechanism broken. The sheet feed had been working (in its normal quirky fashion) before I sent the printer in, and it was not one of the problems I listed (it was probably broken when they went under the hood to try to adjust the manual feed problem.)
__ Also they returned the printer without the manual feed guides, which are not user installed in the 1520. However you are instructed to remove the back feed attachment in the 3000 before shipping, so presumably the repair people forgot which printer they were working on. They also sent the unpacking instructions for an entirely different printer.
__ There is a generous two year warranty on the 1520 and 3000, and a one year warranty on their other printers.
Prices And Configurations For Epson'sTwo Large Format, Mid-Price-Range Models.
Epson makes four large format color inkjet printers:
1) The Stylus Color 3000 which cost just under $2000
2) The xxx, a high end proofing printer with a Fiery rip, which costs around $X000
3) The Stylus Color 1520, originally $799, which can now be found under $500.
4) The Stylus Photo EX which streets under $500Even though the super wide format Epson 1520 printers can now be found under $500, I strongly recommend the Stylus Photo 700 EX if you need to print larger than letter size, but do not need to print up to poster size.
__ The Stylus Photo EX is very much smaller and lighter than the huge, heavy 1520, from my brief experience with the one I just bought, it seems to be better designed and have better driver compatiblity with the computer than the 1520.
__ The latest Stylus Photo printers, the 700 and 700 EX ,are 1440 dpi and use six colors of ink (see below for an explanation of the advantages of six-color printing.)
The Stylus Color line of printers are 1440 dpi and use the traditional four-color CMYK inks
__ The drawback of the Stylus Photo line is the even smaller ink cartridges, which are expensive and cannot be refilled. The black cartridge for the Stylus Photo is about half the capacity of the black cartridge for the 800/1520. However, for color graphics the 1520 uses two color cartridges to every black cartridge, so it is now balanced out between color and black cartridge life, but the cost of ink per page is more for all printing, and for text printing it is twice as much.
__ The Stylus Color 1520 has sheet, tractor, straight line manual, and optional banner feed. The maximum print area is limited.
__ The Stylus Photo EX has only a straight line sheet/banner feed, but it is more reliable than any of the feed mechanisms on the 1520. Also, a straight line is the best for heavier stocks such as the heavy weight Kodak glossy photo papers and the new canvas stocks.Four Color (Cmyk) Vs Six-Color
The color space of CMYK has always been very limited compared with other types of color reproduction.
__ Traditional printing press dithering creates the difference between light and dark values by the size of the ink dots..
Inkjet printers presently have only one dot size and values are created by the number of dots on a given area of paper. This is less than ideal when light tones are needed because the dots become widely spaced and this can cause banding and other unwanted effects.
__ To overcome the one-size dot problem, Epson's six-color Stylus Photo line of printers have added light Cyan and light Magenta inks to the traditional CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow & Black).
__ The addition of light cyan and light magenta means that light tones can be created without widely spacing the dots. This particularly improves gradients and skin tones
New inkjet technology is now being developed that will have variable dots, eliminating the need for more than the standard four colors.Piezo Electric Vs Thermal Drop-On-Demand
Thermal drop-on-demand (called by Canon Bubblejet) uses heat to vaporize the ink onto the paper. This means the dots are not sharp edged. This technology limits the kinds of ink and pigments that can be used, and these colors cannot be as bright or permenent.
__ Piezo electric uses an electrical reaction to jet liquid ink on the paper, creating a precise dot and allowing the use of pigments and inks that are brighter and very permanent. (The Epson printers get amazing blues that blow away even the very expensive Iris thermal drop-on-demand printers.)
Epson was the only manufacturer to use piezo electric until the new HP xxxx , which is only IBM compatible.
__ Note: Piezo electric cartridges cannot be refilled, whereas you can get inexpensive refill kits for drop-on-demand cartridges.
D'Lynn
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