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Printing Using a stabdard Colour Inkjet

Tim Davey

New member
Can anyone comment on whether they think it is possible to get fairly decent prints from an Epson Stylus D88 colour printer? I want to experiment with printing before I bite the bullet and buy a photo printer maybe the R2400 or R3800.

I've got the D88 printer and so far my printing attempts produce sort of flat, washed out and greyish looking photos (despite having calibrated my monitor). I am using Vista however and Epson have told me there is no downloadable ICC profile so I have had to use the standard printer settings.

What does everyone think am I wasting my time?

cheers

Tim..
 

Ray West

New member
Tim,

I get good prints from a 3 colour laser. If you are on a pc (not Mac) and have a half decent scanner, then get profile prism (and qimage) from ddisoftware.com. I can not recommend these two packages highly enough.

Best wishes,

Ray
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Tim,

I'm not sure what the USA equivalent of this printer is but I did discover that it uses Durabrite inks which as I remember totally failed to impress compared to the Epson Stylus color printers. The ink is meant it seems for buisiness use. The colors might last a long time perhaps that's important when one has a proposal with a series of bar charts. One wants the document to still exist 10 years later when there's a court case!

Unfortunately, to me at least, the pictures looked like they had been made with home made inks extracted from soaked time magazines. I personally wouldn't spend the effort on a printer with these inks unless some photographer can reassure you that the printer can indeed be used for this purpose. At present I'm very doubtful.

The cost of these printers is in the ink use. From what I've read in reviews, this machine does use a lot of ink. However, there's no measurement to back it up.

Epson UltraChrome Inks are far better for photographs. I'd look at the R800. Or else the Epson Stylus Photo, HP, (Hewlett Packard) or Canon in that side.

Asher
 

Tim Davey

New member
Thanks for both your replies I think it looks like I will be getting that new photo printer sooner rather than later.
 
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Ray West

New member
Hi Tim,

What exactly do you want to achieve, printing wise.? Icc profiles are obtainable from other places. For example, buy paper from fotospeed, they provide a free profile for your printer, your ink, their paper. Epson will want to sell you their inks, their paper, etc.

You will be surprised with what you can achieve with the software I have mentioned. You can try different papers, inks, printers, etc., to your hearts content, making a profile for each combination at no extra cost, other than ten minutes of your time, and qimage is a value for money editor/rip, but none of this is of any use if you are a mac user.

If you don't understand about profiling, colour space, etc., just changing your printer will be a waste of your money. The information given with Mike Chaney's software is about the best there is, overcomes all the confusing nonsense you get elsewhere on the web. My suggestion is, get that, see if you get good enough results with your existing printer, learn about colour spaces, (if you don't know already), then if required, get an r800, or whatever, and use the same software to profile that. If you intend printing loads, then get a decent cis, to get the ink price down.

Best wishes,

Ray
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Tim,

Here's the skinny,

An Epson Stylus Photo will give pretty well perfect stunning pictures out of the box and even better with the ultrachrome r800. The prfiles that come with the printer and their paper are so great that it might just wow you to satisfaction as long as your monitor is showing the files properly!

Ray's suggestion on buying paper from a supplier that gives profiles too is a perfect addition to this scenario. I doubt whether you need custom profiles of your own.

However, if you do either follow the rest of Ray's advice or else purchase custom profiles for your printer from Jack Flesher, online or some other reliable source.

Asher
 

Tim Davey

New member
Thanks for the info I think I need to investigate the items you both mentioned and report back my experiences to continue the story of my journey through colour managed workflow!!

regards

Tim..
 
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