Canon i9950 sold, want to purchase Epson 1400 LFP printer

[pharmacist]

Just found a shareware version costing only $50 and it supports the Epson 1400. Just figuring out the next week how it works. QuadtoneRIP and it supports B/W inksets and I hope it is also possible to driver each nozzle bank individuallly.

 

[mikling]

Isn't QTR for B&W only?

 

[pharmacist]

This afternoon the printer has arrived and I am anxious to test it. I have ordered a CISS-system from Inkrepublic.com with pigment ink in it. I hope the system can be initialize without the cartridges, but if not I will put the supplied cartridges into the printer.

Yes QTR is B&W only, but it can drive each individual nozzle bank, but it would be nice to use only 6 colours to have the same performance as the 9 channel based K3 printers and without having to swap matte with photo black and vice versa. The 1.5 pl droplets should allow to printer theoretically produce LM, LC and LLB tones without having these dedicated colours been installed.

 

[pharmacist]

This evening I gave the printer a try and installed the cartridges and I'm quite impressed by the quality and the speed of the printer.
The only problem was the rather greenish cast in B/W prints, so I produced a dedicated profile with the Epson Claria ink on my favourite SihlX 280 gsm glossy photo paper from the german discount shop Aldi to neutralize the greenish cast and the results are very good indeed.

Even in standard photo printing quality (1440 dpi) the result rivals that from my previous Canon i9950, but with fewer colours. I hope to report back when the CISS-system with pigment ink will arrive.

 

[mikling]

As I've stated before to some of the Canon non believers, the 1400 is right on the heels of the Pro9000. It is still inferior to the 9000 but I think it is superior to the i9900.

The Artisan 700/800 AIO with the improved engine and apparently different RIP can yield significantly better colors than the 1400 even with the same ink and droplet size. That indicates that droplet size is not everything and this is hard for a die hard Canon user to fathom. The other thing is that there are RIPs and there are better RIPs. This is something I've always been fascinated about, how the engineers go about choosing the patterns for the color output.

While you're at it, you should perform the following experiment. Take a high gloss sheet and print the B&W on it. Now when looking for color cast, look at the image at varying angles just like you would for metamerism and bronzing. Take note of the color cast. When I do this, the color cast actually shifts. This has left me wondering if the cast is due to the refraction of light in combination with the color dot pattern. Sometimes, even with profiling, there are shifts that vary with the angle. indicating that some sort of physics is going on. This phenomena happens predominantly with the Claria line of printers in combination with a high gloss sheet like Kirkland Pro Glossy.

 

[pharmacist]

As I have promised to report back about the CISS: I purchased a CISS for my Epson 1400 photo printer a few weeks ago and finally managed to install the system after having some problem with the right attachment of the tubing system.

Have a look at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKgp3lQ2Rcc

The only problem is to figure out, how to optimize the best CISS tubing attachment inside the printer while diminishing friction of the tubing and print head and minimizing the chances of entanglement of the tubing which can cause the print head to block inside the printer. Therefore you will need to place the CISS bottles at left side of the printer and not at the right side like most CISS manufacturers are advising. Putting on the right side will give you extra stress on the tubing (striking against the housing on the left side) and more chances of blockage of the carriage when the tubing is much more likely to entangle in between the print head. You can check this by comparing the movement of the tubing and print head on other Youtube movies showing similar systems with right placed bottles.

The IRK-4 nano pigment ink is pretty good, despite the gloss difference inherent to pigment ink, and it is possible to produce very neutral prints without the need for custom printer profiles. A good compromise to minimize the gloss difference is to choose for Satin or Pearl type of (semi) glossy papers. Personally I prefer satin papers for pictures, especially when using pigment inks. Satin or Pearl papers suffer significantly less from gloss differential and metamerism than high glossy papers while keeping a very acceptable glossy shine when combined with pigment inks.

The reason I choose for pigment ink, is the archival qualities of pigment ink, which guarantees fade and water resistance for the coming decennia.

The CISS has only be installed for a few weeks and after optimizing the best tubing attachment, I was amazed by looking at the amount of waste ink was dumped by the printer: the bottle is now almost nearly half full. So always install a waste ink bottle, because at this rate the waste ink pads inside the printer will be full within a year of intensive usage and forces you to send the printer for an expensive repair centre to swap out the waste ink pads. The external waste ink pad will keep the inner waste ink pads clean and dry, as long as possible.

I also had bought a set of cheap refillable cartridges which I had previously refilled with the Image Specialists K4 subset of CcMmYK pigment inks (without the MK, LK and LLK inks I am now using in my Epson Pro 3800 printer), but I had discovered the colours will be shifted towards green and you will really need to produce a dedicated printer profile to neutralise this. I think Mikling has worked out a new type of CcMmYK compatible pigment inkset for the Claria dye ink-based printers, which is called "Klariah". I already discovered this when I did print the printer profile target for B/W-prints: almost all the squares tend to be greenish. So just using a subset of the K3 compatible pigment inks is not recommended for those not having the proper profiling tools.

So I think it was a very good idea to tweak the Image Specialists K4 inkset into a much better matched "Klariah" CcMmYK pigment ink subset by Mikling. Most "normal" users will be lost if they discovered the horrible greenish cast when simply putting the Image Specialists pigmented inkset into this printer. The internal RIP handles the colours in quite a different way then the R2400 or the Pro 3800.

I hope that Mikling can confirm my last statement. And yes I did notice the color cast at particular angles with B/W prints. Can it be that the Claria dye ink molecules are so big (to resist fading and oxidative attacks), that the solution tends to be colloidal and incorporate some physical behaviours commonly seen with pigment particles ?

 

[websnail]

The CISS has only be installed for a few weeks and after optimizing the best tubing attachment, I was amazed by looking at the amount of waste ink was dumped by the printer: the bottle is now almost nearly half full. So always install a waste ink bottle, because at this rate the waste ink pads inside the printer will be full within a year of intensive usage and forces you to send the printer for an expensive repair centre to swap out the waste ink pads. The external waste ink pad will keep the inner waste ink pads clean and dry, as long as possible.

Just on this point...

You might want to keep a little listen out for when and how the printer is wasting ink because it could be that your CISs Auto Reset Chips (ARC's) are resetting back to 100% full and forcing a priming routine (ie: new cartridge = priming). If you're shutting off the printer every night you might want to consider leaving it on, if not this may not be the cause of additional waste.

You'll still get waste ink in the pads though if you do borderless printing as that migrates straight to the pads and does not redirect to any external tank. Definitely worth fitting a tank as soon as possible to keep this capacity for such printing if you do it though...

 

[pharmacist]

Hi websnail,

Actually it was my fault: I had a set of refillable cartridges which had some problem with ink feeding well towards the print head and every time I inserted the cartridges the printer started the priming cycle, before I ended with this CISS-system. But still: it is really shocking to see how much ink is waste for priming.

Is it possible to modify the absorption pads for borderless printing, so you can remove the excess of waste ink with a syringe ?

 

[websnail]

Actually it was my fault: I had a set of refillable cartridges which had some problem with ink feeding well towards the print head and every time I inserted the cartridges the printer started the priming cycle, before I ended with this CISS-system.

Ah, yeah that would explain it...

But still: it is really shocking to see how much ink is waste for priming.

Yeah, it's something I hear a lot from customers when they first install an external waste ink kit... Probably the primary reason Epson have never built one in as part of their design...

Is it possible to modify the absorption pads for borderless printing, so you can remove the excess of waste ink with a syringe ?

It's bound to be possible but you would need to dismantle the printer to get to the pads and then figure out how to redirect the waste before modifying it heavily and that's just not practical or advised.

Thing to remember is that your printer will reach an age where a service for things like greasing the printhead runner-bar, change the reset pad sponge, etc... are all a good idea so taking it in and getting all that done while getting the pads changed makes more economic sense.

It's not like all servicing is bad, it's just the mindless need to do it for printers that are less than 6 months old that gets me...