Thinking of purchasing Epson SC P800 printer

[pharmacist]

Because my Epson R3000 has this terrible problem of ink leakage because of the design flaw of the PK/MK motor, I am thinking of buying an Epson P800 printer. Hopefully the PK/MK problem is much much less or almost none existing and also having a lot of Inktec Powerchrome K3 pigment refill ink, which I unfortunately cannot use in a Canon Pro-1000 printer due to the ink formula.

Can someone confirm if the existing resetter for the Pro-3880 can be used to reset the cartridges of the Epson P800 printer, because the maintenance catridge seems to be same ?

The refillable cartridge option is second: there seems to be a problem with certain versions of the P800, allowing the auto reset chips to be used only once. I presume the EU-version is not affected by this problem.

I will first try to repair my Epson R3000: if this does not succeed I will throw it away.

 

[The Hat]

Your best option is to repair your R3000, you’ll need to get the necessary replacement parts and get your hands dirty a bit, then your printer will be like new again, she deserves that much..

The P800 is a nice printer but the way that Epson are going they will and are closing off the use of all 3rd party ink, in a short while the EU will also be effected, so can you afford to take that chance, O’ and your current inks are not colour compatible with the P800..

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I'm not using a P800 and I'm not familiar with it, but I like to bring up some points for consideration.

- The print quality with the P800 overall is supposedly comparable to your current R3000, or even better, this as well in light of your plans to continue to use the current inks.

- The P800 introduced a newer set of Ultrachrome HD inks promising better blacks, better gloss etc, you are probably familiar with those marketing promises. Yes, I can confirm that the HD black inks (refill) deliver better/darker blacks than previous inks I was using or at least testing.

- The P800 uses as well an ink switch for the black inks - the same way as the R3000 does, it depends on your printing habits whether you are switching from/to matte and photo black more or less frequently.
It's the P5000 17" printer which supports both black inks with dedicated nozzle rows.

- You plan to continue with the current set of pigment inks; you are probably happy enough with the print quality in respect to bronzing, gloss differentials between inks and inks and the paper. A remedy to such effects would be the gloss optimizer only used in the Epson P400 , not in any other printer. Epson claims these efffects are very much under control - as long as you use Epson genuine inks on Epson papers. But these effects can become quite visible depending on a particular ink/paper combination. I can confirm to you that the gloss optimizer improves these effects - with a wide margin of the ink type/paper combination giving you a visible improvement or none at all - it is not predictable upfront.
I have seen these improvements with the gloss optimizer - visibly better/darker blacks and a more uniform gloss appearance and an improvement of the color gamut when creating your own profiles. If this would be of concern for you might consider switching to a Canon P1000 which offers you both - the gloss/chroma optimizer and and both black inks available with no switching . If you are happy (enough) with the overall quality of your current print output you just may ignore these comments.

 

[mikling]

Though it uses the same tank, the P800 has that wonderful thing called MEMORY and lots of it. The 3800 had little of it and this you could easily flush the older contents with a FIFO move on one chip. Not so on the P800. I tried it. Now that is on the North American P800.

The EU P800 is not supposed to be affected by the memory so maybe it will work there as well.

The P800 will use more of the darker colors than the Light colors to print the identical image, as a result you will get better balanced ink consumption. The price for this is that the 3000 will print with less gloss differential than the P800. Again it depends on which papers you use and what image you are printing as well.

The P800 prints nicer than the R3000 overall. It is a distinct step up when critically viewed. But lacking side by side comparison many won't tell the difference on a casual glance. It is a distinct step up in B&W even with the same inks.

If you live in the EU and can afford the P800, I would not waste money on the R3000 to repair it. Make the move.

Sad though the only decent colors on the Powerchrome are the two grays and PK. Otherwise the others are kinda dated and muted colors.

 

[pharmacist]

Michael: thanks for your advise. The R3000 was bought second hand from a someone and works perfectly until I decided to switch blacks to print on matte paper and from that moment on, the printer starts to behave strangely It is horrible that Epson never was able to cure this problem. Again: you mentioned the P800 uses more dark ink to print the same image, suggesting the lighter tones are produced with smaller droplets from the same nozzle. This again confirms my thoughts that the lighter colours are actually not needed: the R2000 and the P400 uses small droplets up to 2 pl and yet the prints are not grainy at all. A printer based on the P800 case but with the following ink configuration: Gloss Optimizer, MB, PK, LK (gray), C, M, Y and R(ed) would ultimately combine the pro's of both the P400 and the P800 with reduced ink consumption (no waste of PK/MB change and concentrated colours to produce the light versions of C, M and LK), chromatic Red to produce intenser orange, skin tones and better blues and violets and GO to neutralise gloss difference. The LK (gray) ensures neutral ABW prints. But Epson would compete with this printer their own lines and would sell less ink.

Actually the Inktec Powerchrome is not as bad as I thought: the R3000 uses the original Epson K3 Vivid ink set and the prints are very similar with prints made with the Inktec Powerchrome K3 ink, albeit with more bronzing. The gloss and vividness of the colours are pretty good when profiled, even the Vivid Magenta's. To produce a deeper black I succesfully mixed 1/4 Fuji dye black with 3/4 Inktec Powerchrome PK and the results produces an intenser black compared to the original K3 PK. The positive side effect is much less metallic sheen with the PK (mix).

 

[stratman]

the P800 has that wonderful thing called MEMORY and lots of it. The 3800 had little of it and this you could easily flush the older contents with a FIFO move on one chip.

I cannot tell what significance you attach to memory, genuine or sarcastic.

Also, please explain what you mean by and the significance of "easily flush the older contents with a FIFO move on one chip."

Just looking for clarity. Thanks.

 

[mikling]

The P800 retains the serial numbers of all chips presented to it and even remembers the levels it last saw. On the 3800/80 this memory was not very deep, like only one deep, so when another one was presented, it would push out the prior one FIFO. So if you alternated maintenance tanks, and reset them, it would accept them. This cannot be done on the P800 including all the chips on the ink tanks.
The latest NA firmware of Epson enters a host of stolen serial numbers copied by the aftermarket into the non volatile memory space so that aftermarket chips and reset chips cannot be used as the printer will know. At $50 per tank or more, this is a worthwhile exercise on the segment that uses the most ink per printer. This memory is not user accessible. The only solution is to load firmware that does not check on the chip level and ignores all chips altogether.

Pharmacist, your problem with the black is actually related to the CMY you are using. Adding dye black ink is "cheating" and not really proper but it can be done. The 3000 and K3 system uses CMY in combination with K to generate a black that is ideal for each paper type. Argyll will create profiles that do this provided the depth of the colors is sufficient to create further add to the PK. Many have been misguided about the black. When you inspect Epson PK by itself, you will see it is not as black as you might have thought it would be, so where does the extra depth come in when the printer is printing...now you know. That CMY needs to be good.

 

[stratman]

Excellent explanation. Thank you, @mikling .

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I have observed it as well that the InkTec K3 Photo Black comes with rather strong bronzing creating a kind of metallic/aluminum like look and I replaced it pretty soon; I used it up just by printing less relevant text - Internet etc and switched to other inks.
Epson is tuning the photo black as well on the P400, and most likely on more models, printing with an empty black cartridge - caused by a mismatch between the actual ink level and the status indicator - shows you that the driver is adding some cyan to it , the actual mix will be controlled by the driver, with parameters in relation to the paper selection - for Epson papers.
This becomes visible as well when I use the same black ink - e.g. in the P400 or a WF-2010W, with the same paper setting and the same paper, the blackness/luminance may vary, but as well the color of the black point which gets measured when you do your profiling. The WF-2010W as a simplier printer does not do this fine-tuning of the black, there is no by-printing of other colors. If you carefully look for it under bright light you can see these color differences of the blacks in direct comparison.

 

[mikling]

I am going to explain further about the chip. Each chip now has a UNIQUE serial number or key. In the past there was simply data denoting the color on the chip and model of the chip and ink level. All that the printer was seeking was correct color, model of cartridge and the ink level. So when a tank was accepted by the printer, it would be able to gather those three pieces of data. The chip now also has a serial number.
By having the printer keep in memory the serial number and ink level, it is now able to rejectt a reset cartridge if it has that serial number in memory. It also keeps the ink level as well. Why? it prevents the user from refilling a tank and placing another full one time chip that was accepted before. It will not accept the same serial number if its memory indicates that that serial number was once associated with a lower ink level. This even kills the one time chip and compatibles as well unless they can provide good acceptable serial numbers reserved for compatibles.
Decoders that had preloaded serial numbers are now largely obsolete unless you kept an early P800 and never updated the memory. I have one such item loaded in my P800. For many years Epson had been able to detect NON OEM chips and it is obvious that this was done with digital signing. Once a NON OEM cart was detected, it would ask confirmation ( Nag screen) to continue to use it. On the P800 with decoders, no such action arises, .........just like an OEM serial number.

It is not that hard to create an encryption system that legally allows third party chips to be accepted as well as OEM chips, but ensuring that the serial number generated by Epson are fully unique. Is this illegal? NO, as long as Epson has allowed the capability to make chips not Epson origin to be accepted but there is no ONUS on them to disclose to third party chip people what these keys are or how to generate them. As long as the third party people are able to generate an acceptable serial number they are in the clear. So a word of warning, those ARC chips never did kick up a fuss asking to proceed or not, hints that the ARC serials are stolen Epson ones as well.
If we go back to how old the 3800 and think of the microprocessors in that era, it is obvious that these microprocessors are far far more capable today and even lower costs.
The power is now also used to better control nozzle patterns and more different colors and printing schemes...hence the higher quality output using the same inks. The same effect is also seen on the latest Canon printers in terms of print quality. Canon has not widely adopted the full chip protection like Epson with serial number and ink level. I envisage the trickle down in time. One time chips are still acceptable and can be used over and over at Canon. I imagine the next generation will be different. There are no ARC chips for the newer Canon desktops so I suspect something is already up. On Epson lesser desktop machines, there is an optical detector. When this detector senses no ink, the printer snuffs out part of the chip. If that detector works and sees no ink on some ARC chips, they will also be snuffed out not to reset.