The Fine Art of Desktop Printing

By David Em

February 20, 2006

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Almost every printer sold today produces beautiful color prints. But not all prints are created equal. Some printers produce truer colors than others. Some prints smudge if they get wet. Some are easily scratched. Some fade if exposed to light for a few weeks.

Epson attacked these print quality issues with a vengeance. Its latest series of printers features a new set of inks that produce the best digital prints I've ever seen.

A Quick History

The recent history of digital printing is astonishing. Ten years ago, a high-end Iris inkjet printer cost a couple hundred grand and required an engineer to keep it humming. By every measure, the new Epson printers are in another class entirely, from print quality, to color saturation, to longevity, to price.

In 1999 Epson released the 2000P, a desktop printer with sharp resolution, a 13-inch-wide bed, and a pigmented ink set that produced prints that lasted decades. Back when we used to do the Byte Best of Comdex Awards, we gave it our Best of Show award. The 2000P represented an important step forward for desktop printing, but when I tested it in our lab, I was disappointed by the prints' limited color gamut and metamerism, a phenomenon in which neutral tones noticeably shift color under different illumination sources, usually toward a sickly green.

Epson quickly replaced the 2000P with the Stylus 2200 and its bigger brethren, the 24-inch 7600 and 44-inch 9600. This time Epson got it right. All three printers produced sharp, lush prints on a wide variety of media, and they quickly became the printers of choice for professional photographers, designers and artists. But good as they were, there was still room for improvement.

The New Lineup

The new lineup consists of the $849 13-inch R2400, the $1800 17-inch 4800, the $2995 24-inch 7800, and the $4995 42-inch 9800. All four printers use Epson's recently formulated K3 pigmented inks. I tested the R2400 for this article.

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