It took me quite awhile to start printing my own work. My first attempts were pretty inauspicious, too. I started with an old Epson 2200 around 2017 or so. While that was a capable printer in its day, the one I got had a lot of head clog problems. It hadn’t been used for years and while I was able to get it running, I was always fighting with it and reliability issues that wrecked prints and wasted paper eventually turned me off on it. So it was more of a toy than a “real” printer.
As long as I have been active in digital photography, I have wanted a decent printer for my work. Pictures on a screen are nice to share with people all over the world but they never seemed like photographs until they were printed. Over the years I tried a variety of printing companies and had finally settled on Cloutier Fotographic in Colorado Springs. Jeffrey runs a great operation and the print quality is excellent. Still, I longed for my own printer which I kind of see as the equivalent to the dark room in another era.
In early 2019, I had the opportunity for a solo show of my grain elevator work at the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center in Pueblo, Colorado. When getting ready for the show, I started working up the costs of prints if I were to send it out to a lab as I had been doing for any of my professional level work. When I compared those costs against getting a new printer along with the ink and the paper necessary, the savings were more than $1000 in favor of buying a printer and doing it myself.
So I finally decided to bite the bullet and get a decent printer. In my years of daydreaming about printers, I had researched them pretty heavily and had basically settled on a few models. I was looking at the Canon Pro-1000, Epson P600 and Epson P800. In the end, the inability of the Canon to utilize roll paper left me selecting between the Epson models. The P600 was a little better fit for my budget but the initial price difference would quickly be reconciled in favor of the P800 due to its larger and cheaper ink cartridges. The footprint of the P800 wasn’t much bigger than the P600 and the ability to print 17″ wide by as essentially long as I desired sold me on the higher spec’d P800.
I have been mostly happy with the decision. There are two parts of the P800 that keep me from calling it perfect. The first is that it uses the same black channel for both photo black and matte black inks. To do so, it has to go through a time and ink consuming purge whenever I switch between the two. I don’t print on matte papers very often but it does occur. So it’s a little painful to watch expensive ink go straight into the waste cartridge any time I switch. I just try to minimize the switches as much as possible.
The second problem is one that I almost returned the printer for. The paper transport system uses a set of star wheels to move the paper through the printer. On glossier surfaces, these wheel can sometimes leave dotted marks. These have been referred to as “pizza wheels” and have troubled Epson printers for a few generations now. They’re not universal, though. Several users have made prints on the glossiest of papers and never seen even a hint of a pizza wheel pattern. I saw them appear even on the semi-gloss surfaces that I tend to prefer. So much so that I returned my first P800 and got a second one. It still suffers the problem, too, though…
There is a very specific set of circumstances needed to see these marks. The photo being printed has to have large areas of smooth, dark colors (blue hour skies, for instance). The print must be on semi-gloss or high gloss papers. The print has to be viewed at a very specific angle. And it needs to have very, very intense light on it. So it’s the kind of thing one has to go looking for and would never be visible under normal circumstances. So I learned to live with it, though it still does irk me a bit that a printer that costs this much has such a design flaw.
Beyond those issues, I have been extraordinarily happy with the printer. The prints that it produces are really, really beautiful. They’re sharp and color gamut is very respectable. Epson’s printers above this have a different ink set with more colors and more resulting gamut but they’re large and expensive and beyond my needs for the moment. Maybe someday.
I’ve also really come to love the variety of papers available for the printer. While I’ve settled on a couple of papers that I use 95% of the time, I’m still looking at new paper manufacturers and their various products. I recently tried a sampler pack of Awagami’s line of inkjet papers. Awagami is a very old company making traditional Japanese Washi papers. Their inkjet papers are treated so that they can receive inks from printers but the substrates are all very traditional feeling. I found a (desperately expensive) paper that I am going to try for a couple of black and white photos I’ve recently processed. While it’s a little painful on the pocketbook (around $11/sheet), the paper married with an appropriate photo looks amazing. I look forward to trying more papers from other manufacturers in the future. This is half of the fun of printing at home for me.
Additionally, it’s just nice to see a print come to life every few days. Printers like this need to be exercised to keep their heads from clogging up. When I lived in Pueblo, I needed to print almost every day to avoid head clogs because of the arid climate. Chicagoland is better in this respect, though I still find that I need to print every 4-5 days to avoid head clogs. And I honestly don’t mind that. Sometimes it’s just a little 4×6 print that I run through the printer to give it some exercise. Those little prints still put a smile on my face, though because they have the feeling of “I made that!” to them.
To date I’ve only been using the canned profiles from the various paper manufacturers for my work. These range from good to excellent. Now that I’ve really settled on just a couple of papers, I’m probably going to have some custom profiles made. I thought about doing my own but the calibration tools available at the price point I would invest in fall well short of the top end stuff that outside sources of custom profiles have. So I’ll pay for 2 or 3 profiles from them and be satisfied with the canned profiles for the papers I use less frequently.
All in all, I’m pretty content with the P800. There’s just one very new problem that I need to ponder.
Epson just announced the successor to the P800, the P900. And the new printer has at least one desirable feature over the P800: it no longer needs to swap between photo and matte blacks. I’m going to wait for a slew of reviews on the printer and let it get established a bit before I ponder it too hard. Maybe in a year or so, it might be time for me to contemplate an upgrade, if it is indeed such. Time will tell (I’ve long been a fan of letting others that need to be on the leading edge figure out if a new product makes the grade).
For the time being, I’ll just be happy with the printer I have and will enjoy trying new papers and making beautiful photos with it.
