When some desperate soul takes our setbacks that we try to cross the street and demanded to know what photo printer to buy, we ignore our shoulders and confidence: "You really can not go wrong these days." C ' is particularly the case of inkjet printers for a couple of years, but recently we became a little more enthusiastic. The main models of major manufacturers offer a range of exciting features.
Previously, we raved about Hewlett-Packard 7960. Its integrated into the card reader, printing borderless media on luxurious unusual proof sheets that can be scanned for printing unattended produces beautiful images. The research on the production, we were sure someone else took the shots, not us.
And for the last week, we've even been surprised at the exit of $ 399 Epson Stylus Photo R800. No card reader, no scanning, but its combination of features defines a different personality. If the HP 7960 is a home printing kiosk, the Epson R800 is a master printer in a box.
What a master printer? This is the guy the photo lab that can do anything. One who knows how to do it quickly and better than anyone. The only one who never make excuses. The pro.
HIGHLIGHTSThe R800 from the list of features is impressive. Epson claims the sports industry of the first drop 1.5 picolitre (compared to 2.0 for the Canon i960 and 4.0 for the HP 7960), you will see in particular highlighted in the details of your impressions. These tiny droplets yield 5760x1440 dpi foods by an eight-ink UltraChrome Hi-Gloss pigment inks Thursday, Epson claims that prints are light until 80 years glossy or matte media and more than 100 years storage in the dark.
Calm print engine Epson is also the fastest, offering a 4x6 print in 45 seconds and black and white text at 17 pages per minute. Epson and not skimp on ports, whatever, providing the fastest connections available. High-speed USB 2.0 port is complemented by a FireWire/iLink/IEEE-1994 port which will be particularly welcome among Mac users.
While inkjet at the request of glory, however, is its versatility. This is a device that can just as easily print an envelope as a photo printing. But the R800 redefines versatility. It can print on an astonishing variety of paper sizes of 3.5x3.5 a minimum the letter, legal, A4, declaration, Executive 4x6 5x7 8x10 and a roll of paper into 4 or 8.3-inch widths. Full bleed (borderless) printing is available on 4x6 5x7 8x10 and a roll of paper sizes. Roll documents provide cheaper than the equivalent photo prints sheet sizes, but they require decurling. More interesting for us is a roll of paper the unique ability to print panoramas.
Pro photographers have long admired the Epson 2200 for its ability to print on a variety of paper types and the R800 can do the same in a smaller format. Epson offers a wide range of papers optimized for their inks including Premium Glossy, Premium Semigloss, Premium Luster Enhanced Matte, Matte Heavyweight Paper and Premium Bright White. But the printer can also manage stocks more exotic with its straight-through on the passage of paper.
You can adapt 100 sheets of plain paper, 20 sheets of photo paper or 10 envelopes in its leaflet input tray.
But the R800, this is not just printing on paper. It also manages Print 5 inches and 8 cm CD and DVD, but with less congestion than in other media. Epson recommends 24 hours drying time and warns against manipulation, even dry with wet hands, but it is a small price to pay to eliminate Sanford Sharpie markers and stickers.
SPECS An Energy Star device, the R800 consumes 20 watts when printing, but only two paused and includes a buffer of 64 kilobytes. It needs 12.1 inches by 19.5 Real Estate rose 7.8 inches and weighing 17.6 kg. without its cartridges. You will need a depth of about 25 inches once you have extended input and output trays (which also require another five inches of clearance height).
The attractive silver and dark gray plastic casing has smoked a plastic window on top through which you can detect printing action. The front of the printer has four buttons: Power, Paper (load, eject and resume printing, cancel print job), ink (to access ink cartridges and clean the head 'printing) and a roll of paper (to print a guide to cut food and a roll of paper).
The output tray has two positions, an inferior position which is slightly tilted up if the paper does not take off from the printer when he ejected (as is the case with the HP 7960) and a high, flat served to feed the disc tray.
Rated letter/A4-sized of 25000 pages per month, it includes a one-year limited warranty. But you must bring your own printer cable to the party.
SOFTWARE The R800 can optimize the production by reading the information on exposure PRINT Image Matching Camera. Photoshop plug-in is planned to convert data in the 2001 Epson Color space, since Photoshop does not keep data SIDs EXIF header.
It also supports technology Exif Print, which uses data exposure as a way to optimize the scene print settings.
Drivers for Windows 98SE/2000/ME/XP and Macintosh Classic 8.6-9.2 and OS X 10.2 and more are included. The pilot OS X actually used to install printers separate manual feed roller documents and plug.
The software runs on both platforms, even if it has a reason for Windows, which we call, which Mac users May find a little kludgey. Applications include Film Factory for the organization, display and printing of images and printing CD for the design and printing works of art for CD and DVD, together with documentation in HTML format.
Heads printing piezo Epson uses piezo print heads rather than thermal print (as in the HP 7960 and Canon i960). Piezo heads ink fire using an electric charge to distort the print head. Thermal heads ink by fire heating until it broke.
Inkjets that are not regular use butcher dry pigments in the head. Epson provides check nozzle and the cleaning of its functions in the drivers to maintain the print heads and there are more draconian measures at the disposal of cleaning them, too. But the failure of a print head piezo usually means replacing the printer. The repairs are possible, but expensive.
These two technologies are stunning images, but if you're an occasional user, heads piezo might disappoint you.
ALL INK The inks used in the R800 is an intriguing series of pigments. Most inkjets use dye-based inks which are encapsulated in the surface of the media. Colorants provide better and wider range of color but tend to be less permanent than pigments, particularly in the media that are not designed for them. Thus, the HP 7960 requires HP papers provide extended the light while the R800 can print on almost anything. The pigments are resistant to fading. As the outer layer deteriorates, it is replaced by a layer of fresh, a bit like an onion.
But dyes and pigments are only dyes. To get from the cartridge on paper, ink a vehicle is deployed. A dye is dissolved in the vehicle, which evaporates when it is on paper. But pigment must be wrapped in the vehicle, which is a delicate undertaking. Pigments tend to have a difficult time on ice surfaces, where uniformity is difficult to achieve, working better on paper satin finishes. But the R800 has a brilliant Optimizer cartridge that meets this weakness rather well.
Although corresponding to a specific color (for example, some companies colors PMS) can be delicate with pigments, the R800 adds two new pigments to build an unusually wide range of colors. The Red and Blue complement cartridges usual cyan, magenta and yellow to provide Epson cartridges demand that 22 per cent greater range of colors as the HP 7960. The same comparison shows that it is six percent larger than the Canon i960 and even one percent over Epson 2200, which uses light cyan and magenta clear rather than red and blue.
The cartridges are $ 15 each (Gloss Optimizer provided as a two-pack at this price). Wait about 60 8x10s a whole, although red, blue and black mat will not run as quickly as others. At $ 13.50 for a package of 20 Premium Glossy 8x10 sheets, is roughly $ 38 paper, so that the price per print is about $ 2.60, roughly equivalent to the HP 7960 $ 2.50 (considering our inception in math).
PAPERS Epson sells a number of documents for their Stylus Photo line of printers. The names, however, could use a bit of clarification:
- Premium Glossy is a photo-weight paper coated with a resin glossy.
- Premium Luster is a weight resin-coated photo "E" type of paper with a bright light and even the texture of surface found in the photo lab prints.
- Premium Semigloss is a photo-weight paper coated with a resin semigloss finish.
- Enhanced Matte is a thick, shiny white, paper mat flat.
- Heavyweight Matte is a brilliant white, ultra-smooth coated with a matte finish.
Whatever you charge sheet, be sure to tell the driver about this. Optimum ink coverage is very different for a brilliant who can hold the ink to a mat that absorbs sheet.
THIRD PARTY options Any Day Now, we expect to see a television murder mystery solved by the discovery in a laboratory of crime, that the author did not use genuine Epson ink and paper. There is a difference.
The difference May not be perceptible outside a laboratory of crime and May not be as important as the penny saved, but the complexity of the manufacture of ink and chemicals interaction between the ink and paper we persuade it is small tribute to pay when you need the best of the printer.
This is true for HP and Epson. Of course, neither company (to our knowledge) manufactures its own inks and papers. But that does not mean that manufacturers are free to rebrand the same thing for sale at lower prices.
The small size of droplets of the Standing Epson print heads are a new warning against the use by third inks. However, we would not hesitate to launch a favorite throughout the Epson paper. It May not be optimized for inks, but we could just as what we see.
A roll of paper While the R800 includes a two-room apartment roll adapter, our evaluation unit does not include a roll of paper. So, we hustled to CompUSA and picked up a 4-inch roll of paper that had a nice patina of dust on it for $ 18. It is 26 feet or 52 4x6 paper without waste (but there will be waste). It's cheaper than buying 4x6 sheets but more expensive than print 4x6 under dye, for example, the Hi-Touch printers (which can be done for about 40 cents a shot).
A roll of paper has a loop, which is more pronounced the deeper into the deployment that you receive. Just to feed the paper into the straight-through on the passage of paper on the R800, you must decurl the first or six inches. Epson shows how using the manual roll of paper so as not to tarnish the printing surface.
After printing, you want decurl paper before cutting. We rolled it in the opposite direction and held for several hours with a rubber band. When we published the document placed perfectly flat. And has remained that way. Of course, you can also get it to lay perfectly flat when you mount and frame.
The R800 does not include a detailed cutting automatic (as on the Stylus Photo 960), is one neither available in the form of attachment.
Our interest in a roll of paper, however, was not to print 4x6 images. We have a number of draws panorama (built with Photoshop Elements), which we printed on sheets of 8.5x11 inch up to APS panorama frames. It is always a little disappointing, like the search to a letterbox format film on a 13-inch television.
But with the R800, we doubled the size of our views and they sprang to life. To do so is driver's ability to create custom page sizes, but get the width and height right was against a little-intuitive.
Side by Side We printed a particularly dynamic hibiscus on three different printers and compare them side by side. We have invited different visitors to compare them without knowing what printer printed print any individual. And the results are fairly evenly distributed. As we have said, you can not lose.
However, we can make a few observations. The dye in print from a Hi-Touch printer is more saturated, but weaker than either the HP 7960 or R800 printing. The two prints inkjet have been very difficult to distinguish.
BLACK & WHITE For all the interest in color prints, it is interesting to note that the HP 7960 and the R800 have special features for printing in black and white. The HP uses a special ink cartridge with three gray (light, medium and dark), while the R800 includes a Matte black ink cartridge in addition to its blacks.
Other blacks are designed to provide a wider tonal range without the dominant colour usually presented at printing a quadtone, a neutral monotone using inks primary color. We detect a dominant colour, even in these neutral blacks (both HP and Epson), so we are not disturbed by any we find in a quadtone, you can at least move to a warmer or colder cast. But they offer a rich black and white print only using the black.
Bit really outshone Epson HP in this category. For two reasons.
The first is that the Epson is quite at home printing on several types of glossy photo paper including, Premium Luster Enhanced Matte Matte and cumbersome. The matte papers to print a flat, with less density in the shadows, since the paper absorbs the ink, but the treble is bright for the same reason. Luster does not absorb as much ink through its support shiny surface.
The second reason is the R800 of 1.5 picolitre droplet. Even under magnification, you can not detect any screen model in these impressions.
On the glossy and shiny surface, you see what looks like grain, but not your father cereals. It is a very, very fine grain that makes our old 8x10 RC prints of Tri-X look like pointillist paintings. This is true even in moments of a color print, again, where everything you detect any pattern of grain, much thinner than we have ever seen in our darkroom prints.
But on the matte surfaces, you can not see anything other than tone. The absorption of very beautiful place of ink completely erases all kinds of grain, creating great washes of sky, for example.
However, HP shiny surface of the paper summarizes its inks and dyes screen model (in fact, the lines themselves) is visible under magnification. Prints benefited from normal viewing distances are quite delicious, understand, but we found the range Epson and resolution much more exciting for black and white.
PAPER ORDINARY A inkjet, we have seen, is an all-in-one printer capable of producing photo-quality images and letters and envelopes. But not all photo-quality inkjets can transmit the routine for printing pages of a small office or home users. And most inkjets not handle these tasks are not optimized for printing photos.
We were delighted to find the Epson at home also printing on plain paper as a result of high-quality prints. It can handle up to 10 envelopes (in various formats standard) and flies by the text printed from a word processor. It is a very attractive for printing pages of our Web browser, too.
We simply can not think of an application with a menu editor that the R800 will not be flat.
DISCS Sooner or later your precious images eventually be archived on CD or DVD. And puisqu'il n'y aura more One some regime labelling east indispensable. We have succeeded so far with a Sharpie Sanford (favoured by autograph dogs) not to lose data with images dating from 1998. Paper labels with adhesive fear, but we limit the records, we present as souvenirs or gifts. We suspect they are lost before they deteriorate.
Since these CDs are an important part of the experience in digital imaging, would not it be nice if your inkjet printer can print labels for them? The R800 can. And this is a case where you do not have to worry about using non-Epson media. Any printable inkjet disc is fine (but not thermal printable discs).
Start by cleaning the printer running rolls of blank paper in the printer. Press the button to instruct the document sheet and press again to send it by.
Epson recommends burn the disc before printing. The impression is messy by nature and needs of burn virgin. Once burned, you drop the disc into the black plastic tray (using the adapter ring for discs 8 cm).
The printer output tray actually two positions. For normal printing, simply drag it down. But for printing CD, you pull it up until it stops before slipping in its upper position, which establishes it flat. Insert the drawer until the white arrows on the sides are aligned with the corresponding arrows on the output tray. Then press the button to instruct the paper disc in the position of printing, which consumes around the plate.
The next trick is to create the cover art. Epson provides a particular application, Epson Print CD, just for that. But you can (probably) to build your own model in any image using an editor 8.5x11 inch size, centering 4.75-inch hard side to side and throw 4.25 inches high. Or simply be the work of art the size of your image editor, save it in JPEG format and take advantage of Print CD to print.
Print settings are enormous and the Letter manual feed. Do not forget to bring a CD or DVD as the type of support.
Records print quickly. The delay to 23 seconds to transfer data to print and 1:10 for a total of 1:33. Epson recommends letting them dry for 24 hours before using them.
FIREWIRE VS. USB Epson provided hours of interesting test for printing on the FireWire 400 and USB high-speed ports on a R800 Sony Pentium running Windows XP Professional.
Although FireWire 400 can (obviously) transfer to 400 megabits per second, specifications USB 2.0 was a little less straightforward. In fact, according to the specifications 2.0, USB 2.0 encompasses three speeds: low (1.5 Mbps), full (12Mb / s) and high (480Mb / s). High-Speed USB reached the highest data rate of 480 Mb / s. This is what you get with the R800.
Total print once and for 8x10 borders were FireWire 2:57, 3:00 for USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 for 4:55. A 8x10 borders with printed in FireWire 2:27, 2:29 for USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 for 4:15.
Spool times were fastest with a FireWire interface (13 seconds and 15 seconds borders margin), but USB 1.1 USB 2.0 beaten. USB 1.1 decelerated in 14 and 15 seconds compared to 16 and 16 for USB.
The main advantage of FireWire capacity for Macintosh users is that it offers a speed data transfer to their printers even if they do not have a USB 2.0 port. Very few inkjets offer FireWire press, but when you print 8x10s, you enjoy shaving nearly two minutes off your time printing the standard USB 1.1 port.
For Windows users, FireWire is the main advantage of freeing the most versatile USB port for other devices which are only USB, as tablets, mice, keyboards, card readers, etc.
Therefore, it is a good feature, but for anyone of importance to Mac users.
FILM Factory Film Factory offers a convenient way to print your images in ways that are not easy to manage in your typical image editor.
The main menu lets you select the standard Prints, index prints, prints double album pages, greeting cards, stickers prints, calendars and prints Combo. These options generally provide simple to use, layouts for printing your images. The main menu, it is also easy to import, export and select images already on your hard drive. Film Factory offers a number of retouching tools that are easy to use, even for beginners. He also built in a slide show.
We have selected 16 images of an exit, all printing options and let fly after loading the printer with paper 5x7. A 45 seconds per picture, we took a shower and returned to find a stack of printed images of dry to the touch, without compensation.
There is a user interface some trouble. Slides should be dragged, they do not jump to where you click. And guidance, it is better to leave only if you've turned your images. But for all packages smooth who lack the features you need, it's nice to find one who can do whatever you want.
PRINT CD Our first experience with Print CD, the CD artwork request, was frustrating. Then we can read the manual.
Two buttons are all it takes quickly to bring together works of art print on your disk. A button reveals a wealth of options, so you can easily select and mask an image. Just drag around the mask for the better. A text button lets you add text, colour and use rudimentary shadow. Some text effects to distort and run the text along different paths are also available.
Once we knew how to play the game, we put together a simple label very quickly.
The program also lets you adjust the position of print (and a white board is provided to check the position). You can also adjust the density printing to reflect differences in how discs from different manufacturers absorb ink.
Conclusion You can not go wrong, we must repeat, but there are many ways you can go right to Epson R800.
It will be particularly appreciated by those who enjoy printing beyond the 4x6 Jumbo. Roll-fed panoramas, printable CD / DVD, a range of colour and black and white documents that reminds us of our darkroom Seagull days of discussion, Ilford Kodak and all sheets printed with pigment inks Archives are characteristics that tug as a pro, amateur and artist.
But the excellent printing paper (including envelopes) and practical batch printing with PIM and Exif Print improvements will be applauded by the average Joe and Jane, too.
We had so much fun with him, the batteries ran down our quibble Meter and we have not taken the trouble to reload for this review. But then, you do not quibble with a master printer.
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