Making fine prints in your digital darkroom
Photo printers
by Norman Koren
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In this page we introduce printer technologies, then we describe the Epson 2200 (my current printer), the 1280/1290, and a few others. We include troubleshooting tips. The page ends with a discussion of the number of pixels required for high quality prints. Related pages:
| Related pages: | Papers and inks | Printer calibration | Black & White printing |
May, 2005. Epson has revamped its line of Ultrachrome printers with a new series that takes the 8-color Ultrachrome K3 ink set. The new models include the R2400 (13 inches wide; $850 USD), 4800 (17 inches wide; $2,000 USD), 7800 (24 inches wide; about $3,000 USD), and 9800 (44 inches wide; about $5,000 USD). Useful links:
February, 2004. Epson has released a new set of ICC profiles for the 2200 printer. The profiles are for 1440 and 2880 dpi for Premium Luster, Semigloss, Glossy, Enhanced Matte, Watercolor - Radiant White, Velvet Fine Art, and PremierArt™ Water-Resistant Canvas. I haven't had a chance to evaluate them. Finding them can be a little tricky because you can't link directly to Epson pages, and as of February 2004 they're not yet on Epson USA's Drivers & Downloads page for the 2200. To locate them you must click on Announcements (in the left column), then click on New ICC Profiles for Epson Stylus Photo 2200. They obvouisly won't be there forever; I'll update this page when they move. I have a problem with the workflow in their How to use ICC profiles document. In Step 7 for Windows, it recommends selecting Assign working RGB: Adobe RGB (1998) for documents that have no embedded ICC profile. This is generally a bad practice because the Windows default color space for images with no embedded profile is sRGB. But there are exceptions. If you convert a RAW file to Adobe RGB (1998) with Canon's (mediocre) File Viewer Utility, it won't embed a profile. Bad practice, but Epson's recommendation is appropriate in this case. Then in Step 8 it recommends assigning a different profile if the color balance appears incorrect. Very slipshod! It's best to select the correct profile when you open the file, then use other adjustments. |
| Epson dominates the market for photo quality printers, but Canon and Hewlett-Packard offer serious competition. The inks in the older Epsons weren't lightfast, but that changed in 2000 with the introduction of the Stylus Photo 870 and 1270, which print 8½ and 13 inches wide, respectively. And things continue to improve. |
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My top choice for a printer today would be one of the Epson Ultrachrome printers. In October 2002 I purchased the Epson
Stylus Pro 2200 (replaced by the R2400 in mid-2005), which prints 13 inches wide. Reasons: long print
life, excellent color gamut, and good B&W performance. The 17 inch
wide 4000, 24 inch
wide 7600, or 44
inch wide 9600 are
the printers of choice for high volume work. The 13 inch wide Epson 1280/1290
and Canon S9000/i9100 printers would be my second choices: less expensive,
but shorter print life (about 25 years) and not quite as good for B&W. (See news above for the 2005 replacements.)
Among 8½ inch wide printers I'd consider the Epson R800, which uses Ultrachrome inks and the Hewlett-Packard 7960, which uses 8 dye inks that last nearly as long as Epson Ultrachrome pigments. The 8 inks include black and two grays: it's reputed to be outstanding for Black & White printing. Confession: I don't keep up with smaller printers, so this is almost certainly out of date..
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The
Epson
Stylus Photo 2200 (2100
outside North America; replaced in mid-2005 by the R2400), introducedAugust 2002, was the first of Epson's
7-color "Ultrachrome" printers. It has seven ink cartridges-- one for each
color, which saves ink because you don't have to replace a 5-color cartridge
when one ink runs out. But the 18 ml cartridges can still be expensive
if you do a high volume of printing. Prints up to 13 inches wide
(A3+/Super B print size). $650.
Compared
to the 2000P it features better color gamut, deeper blacks and faster printing,
but less image permanence: 75-100 years instead of 200-- still very good.
4 picoliter droplet size. The ink set includes gray (light black) and a
choice of matte or photo black (for matte (fiber-based) or RC papers,
respectively). It is better suited for B&W than the 2000P, but it still
has some metamerism (change in appearance under different light sources).
Its roll paper holder has an automatic cutter (a big improvement
over the flimsy piece of trash that passed for the 1270 roll holder). It
also has a special feeding slot for thick fine art papers.
Ultrachrome printers have been a tremendous commercial success. As a result, several models are now available.
Epson Stylus Photo 1270 (replaced by the 1280/1290 February 2001) 1440 dpi. Prints up to 13 inches wide using relatively lightfast dye-based inks, rated by Wilhelm Research at 10 years on Premium Glossy paper and 25 years on Matte Heavyweight. The prints are beautiful! Color gamut is excellent. All surfaces reproduce deep rich black tones. I used a 1270 between early 2000 and September 2002, when I got the 2200.
Available papers for the 1270/1280/1290 Papers not on this list may have longevity problems due to chemical interaction with the dyes. My printer settings are on the Printer calibration page. Epson also recommends Premium Glossy or Semigloss for the 1280, but I don't; I removed them from the list below because of their susceptibility to red shift fading.
| "Red shift"
fading in dye-based printers (Epson 1270/1280/1290, Canon S9000 etc.)
A few months after the 1270 was introduced, people started noticing that Premium Glossy prints would occasionally and unpredictably turn orange or red due to fading of the cyan dye. This turned out to be a big embarrassment for Epson. I saw the "red shift" once. I accidentally left a Luster print in my bright skylit living room where it received direct afternoon sun, and it faded severely in just one week-- with frightening rapidity for such a short period. I did a few tests-- it was something in the air, not sunlight or summer heat. A Luster print in a shady part in the same room faded at the same rate, but the same print in my cool dry basement didn't fade at all. None of the Matte Heavyweight prints faded. "Red shift" is caused by oxidation of the cyan dye. The culprit was originally thought to be ozone (O3 )-- a particularly potent form of oxygen, but it's now recognized that plain oxygen (O2 ) in combination with still unknown atmospheric contaminants which act as catalysts can cause the fading. Not nice! My Luster paper turned out to be an old batch. Anti-oxidants were added to Premium Gloss, Premium Semigloss, and Premium Luster starting in 2001. (See the Inkjetart.com article.) This improves things, but doesn't fix the problem entirely-- fading can start when the anti-oxidant is depleted. And display life is only rated at 10 years. Framing the print under glass eliminates the problem. Polypropylene sleves offer some protection. Check out Bob Meyer's site for more detail on this problem. As a result, the only papers I can recommend for the 1270/1280/1290 are Matte Heavyweight and swellable polymer papers, such as ColorLife, which has a lovely semigloss surface and a claimed longevity of 25 years. Canon dye-based printers suffer from the same problem. |
| Epson
printer troubleshooting and maintenance tips
1270/1280/1290 Ink formulation has been changed from the original. Ron Harris no longer likes B&W with Matte Heavyweight paper. Here is Epson's documentation. Eliminating "Rail Drag" Here is a valuable tip from Inkjetart.com's Inkjet NEWS & Tips - 10 Dec 01. It seemed to fix my communication error problem (below) for a while. I strongly recommend subscribing to this newsletter. Is your inkjet printer starting to make awful sounds and/or making a mess of the files sent to it? It could be that your print heads are suffering from "rail drag". This is one of the most common repair problems we hear of (often costing a minimum of $50 if your printer is out of warranty, or at the least several days of down time even if it is under warranty).Printer stops part way through a print with "communication error."After about a year my 1270 would intermittently stop part way through a print and give me a "communication error" message. Flaky! This problem drove me crazy. I reinstalled the drivers from the USA and UK sites, rearranged the IRQ's, reinstalled Windows 98, etc., to no avail. Cleaning the rails (above) seemed to help for a while. I changed the motherboard, installed Windows XP Pro, removed the USB hub and made sure there was sufficient disk space on the C drive for a scratch file-- at least five times the image file size for 1440 dpi printing. But the problem persisted. I heard that the only surefire solution is to switch from USB to a parallel printer connection-- slower on my old computer with Windows 98. Perhaps not so slow on my new computer with Windows XP. I bought a USB 2.0 PCI card to accomodate my Epson 2450 scanner. It uses different drivers from standard USB 1.1 cards. The USB 2.0 card fixed the problem.
Windows XP printing errors? Most errors can be fixed by installing Service Pack 1, which includes the latest USB 2.0 drivers.You will need to update the drivers for the USB host controllers. Robert Zembowicz (and Microsoft) have some valuable advice on doing this. Before I installed it the print spooler often failed to clear completed print jobs. Here's what I did. (1) Close the print spooler (spoolsv.exe). The quickest way is to open the Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) and end the spoolsv.exe process. (2) Remove old print jobs by deleting *.SHD and *.SPL files from C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\PRINTERS. Explorer must be set to view hidden and system files. It might be a good idea to do this whenever you cancel a print job midstream. (3) Restart the print spooler. This can be done by clicking Start, Run..., and entering spoolsv.exe in the Open: box. It can also be done from the Task Manager. I made a shortcut (to C:\WINDOWS\system32\spoolsv.exe ) to speed up this process. Sometimes spoolsv.exe takes a minute or so to restart. When you check print job status in the Printers and Faxes window, you may want to click View, Refresh. It doesn't always show current status. An alternative approach to stopping/restarting the print spooler is to open the Control Panel, double-click on Administrative Tools, Services, click on Print Spooler, then stop it. Delete the *.SHD and *.SPL files, then restart it from the Services window. Before I found these fixes I always had to reboot my computer, sometimes twice, whenever it refused to print. But these fixes weren't perfect. The software sometimes failed to recognize the printer-- the ink level boxes in Printer Preferences remained clear white or grayed out. Dale cotton has a page on printer maintenance. |
Canon has several 6-ink dye-based printers that compete with Epson. Like the Epson dye-based printers they suffer from the red-shift problem, which is dealt with by using matte or swellable polymer glossy papers. Photo-i has a review of the 5-ink i865, which is classified as a business printer-- fewer cartridges than the Photo printers listed below..
Your only concern is that you have sufficient image pixels per inch
on the print. The following table has some useful guidelines.
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Perceived print quality |
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Outstanding. As sharp as most printers can print; about as sharp as the eye can see at normal viewing distances. |
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Excellent. Close
to 300 PPI for small prints, 8½x11 (or A4) and smaller.
Outstanding quality in large prints, 11x17" (or A3) and larger, which tend to be viewed from greater distances. |
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OK for large prints. Adequate, but not optimum, for small prints. |
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Adequate, but not optimum, for large prints. Mediocre for small prints. |
These numbers are actual pixels per inch, not necessarily the dpi or ppi "resolution" of the image file, which is actually a scaling factor. Print file size and scaling are discussed in Pixels, images, and files. Print sharpness measurements are described in Understanding image sharpness part 3: Printers and prints.
Digital Dog's 1600x2000
pixel test image looks very sharp printed at 200 pixels per inch on
Letter-size paper. There is only a small improvement in going to 300 pixels
per inch. If I don't plan to print larger than Letter size, I scan at 2000
dpi with the Canon FS4000US (1800 dpi with the Hewlett-Packard S20). This
keeps file sizes smaller and speeds editing. If I plan to print A3 or larger
I scan at maximum resolution.
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| Images and text copyright (C) 2000-2013 by Norman Koren. Norman Koren lives in Boulder, Colorado, where he worked in developing magnetic recording technology for high capacity data storage systems until 2001. Since 2003 most of his time has been devoted to the development of Imatest. He has been involved with photography since 1964. |  |
If
your prints don't look right,the
first thing to do is to run the nozzle check check. If any of the
six colors fail the test, run the Head Cleaning cycle. The test doesn't
take much time or ink, and you can use scratch paper. You access it through
the Utility tab in the printer Properties window.
