My personal EPSON R1800 review

. I am sorry for not posting so long... Loth of things happened in the world since then - but the proceeding fascization of human minds scares me the most from all the good and bad I have observed ever since.

. Back to track.

. This may sound interesting. Ever since I noticed that the EPSON Stylus Photo R1800 / R800 has "new" colors, other than the usual offered by anyone else, I became to be interested. But one day I got to install such printer and made nozzle check print, all was clear. The revolutionary invention should - according to my theory - be that the CMY color system is abandoned on this printer. HOW you ask?

. A little background: The minimum setup for color printing is CMY - cyan, magenta, yellow. You can mix all colors from these pretty well. (Pixma iP1200 is one such good example :P) If you look at the hue circle - you will see the colors equally spaced around - 120 degrees. Okay - any disadvantages? Yes - the color resolution - if you can place any small/big amount of ink on the paper it is less of a problem, but you can not. You are limited with your DPI and drop modulation options, plus the ability of the paper TO SINK ALL THE INK. Imagine you wan to make a RED color in a small spot. You spray 10 drops of magenta and 10 drops of yellow. You have it. You see that IF you are limited to only 10 drops of each at maximum at a certain spot, the amount of different colors is too limited. That is why Canon uses CMYRG in their high class printers. If you can mix the colors between yellow and red and between red and magenta, you get double the color resolution at the same DPI and speed. OR you can be twice as fast with your print to achieve the same color resolution.

. Now we get to the EPSON R800 or EPSON R1800 color system. The designers got a crazy idea - "what if we increased the resolution of the colors we need the most?" Okay, what colors do you need the most? "Well, our customers want to print beautiful human beings dressed in blue." Hey! Is that why all the test prints in advertising feature a pretty face with blue textile?

. I highly suspect they never intended just to add pure blue and pure red as you can see them on the picture above. The first striking difference is the "BLUE" which seems to be exactly halfway between blue and magenta on the nozzle check printout. What do you achieve by "twisting" the colors in such a "perverse" way? If you look at the second, EPSON R800 (R1800) hue circle, you will see that the shift is substantial. But you can easily spot that the colors are more on the borders of the pure colors, not in the middle - except of the yellow. [Well still waiting for the test print and microscopy to confirm - in august] This way you can get even more resolution in "mission critical" applications - printing human faces and blue sky. Well, talking about it - I printed a CD with the R1800 with some photos and the blue on the prints is blue, I mean BLUE, not just some dots! The sky, the blue umbrellas, totally perfect!

. Now about the EPSON new color system again:
- Mixing the yellow and the shifted red allows easier printing of skin tones, less possible errors in reproduction, much less perceptible dots - still visible, but not distracting!
- Between the shifted red and shifted magenta are other important tones - lips, roses, Ferrari F40, all get mixed from TWO and MORE colors at once, thus providing perfect coverage - no white space, no annoying dots.
- Did I already mention how the printer renders the blue tones of sky and such? Looking at the printout on flat CD seemed more satisfactory than looking out trough the window.
- Any disadvantages? Ehmmmmm, yes. The color mixing. I mean software. With CMY only, it is extremely easy to define how to mix a certain color, certain shade. There is only ONE way in each case hoe to do it. In a 7-color system, where 6 colors are unique (the two blacks can be counted as one, since only the density and gloss level differs and the gloss optimiser is not used for coloring :P) you have much more ways how to mix a certain color. But once you master that, you can create amazing, stunning presentations - well, that is the whole point of making presentations, right?
- The analyst reviews of the printers were just a bit disappointing - well, that "the wide gamut printer has lower than miraculous gamut capabilities" That can be true. But from what we have seen, the gamut of the printer is set to suit the needs for realistic photos of REAL OBJECTS, second the ICM profiles can change/improve it.
So what is the point of some of the 8-color printers with 3-black inks, 2 magenta inks, two cyan inks and one yellow ink?

• need for only 4 pigments or dyes
• gain in speed at reasonable intensity modulation quality
• improved intensity modulation, especially in light grey, less or no visible dots
• gray shade color purity, no greenish or purplish grey
• the light grey and light light gray can be mixed to ordinary colors to darken them a little
• ehmmm, I forgot the last one. It's 3 in the morning. sorry.