I'll just note that things have come a long way since the 1270 was the
better option for B&W printing.
Personally, I'm running a C86 and printing BO (I got lucky with the C86,
most can't do good BO) and am getting prints good enough to show. If I'd
bought a month later, I would have gone with the R200 and MIS inks,
which weren't an option when I got my C86.
-Adam
Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote:
On Feb 11, 2006, at 1:02 PM, Adam Maas wrote:
Swapping ink cart sets between B&W and color is impractical and
very expensive. You waste about 20% of the ink in a set each time
you swap when you try to clear it, and a set of UT2 ink carts is
almost $90, a set of standard Epson carts about $50.
Not an issue with the R220, this problem is specific to the 13" and
larger printers which run tubes from the carts to the head rather
than having the carts on top of the head. One head clean and your
good with the R200 and R220. And that's a lot less than 20% of the
ink. The MIS carts are also refillable, and the ink is much cheaper
in bulk. UT2 is $55 for a set of refillable carts for the 1270 btw.
Hmm. The ink carts fit on top of the heads in the 1270, far as I can
see. It took fitting carts, running the standard purge and clean, and
then printing about 8 standard pages striped with saturated colors in
each of the inks for the printer to completely purge the heads in my
experience.
I have had poor experiences with refillable cartridges, stopped using
them years ago. Maybe they're better now.
...However, the workflow for the R200 and R220 with the MIS EZ
dedicated inksets uses the Epson driver, not QTR by default.
I never got results that I liked with the Epson drivers. I couldn't
hang five prints together without seeing variations. First I did Jon
Cone's PiezographyB&W setup, which produced beautiful results but
ultimately destroyed the heads on an 1160. Then I went to MIS inks on
the 1270 and used their workflow for a bit. That's why I bought
QuadToneRIP for the 1270 ultimately.
The R2400 is definitely as good for output. But it isn't cheaper
when compared to current MIS costs (Especially if you get a chip
resetter and refill)
My records show:
I've had the R2400 since October and have consumed four of the carts
at $12@, producing about 140-160 A4 to A3 Super sized prints on Epson
Enhanced Matte paper. My records show that a similar number of
similar sized prints with the 1270/MIS/QTR setup consumed $140 worth
of ink vs $48, and I hadn't printed any color at all with it for two-
three years.
BTW: Roy Harrington agrees with what I'm reporting. The cool thing is
that his software allows high quality results on printers that
weren't designed to print B&W, but with the current generation Epsons
using the K3 inkset you're much better off.
We were laughing about it last night ... I still have the 1270
because it is the best envelope printer I've got, neither the HP 7960
nor the Epson R2400 is useful for printing envelopes in bulk. The
last dregs of my MIS ink printed the 2005 holiday card envelopes... ;-)
Godfrey
