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Author Topic: Epson XP-15000 announced, nobody noticed?  (Read 6432 times)

NAwlins_Contrarian

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Epson XP-15000 announced, nobody noticed?
« on: December 10, 2017, 12:53:37 am »

Epson apparently announced a new enthusiast photo printer almost a week ago and nobody noticed / reported it. On December 4, 2017, Epson announced the XP-15000 printer, which appears to replace the Artisan 1430 printer (which I think is the model called the 1500 in some markets). The XP-15000 prints up to 13x19 inches using 6 colors of Claria HD ink. The six colors of ink have changed from Epson's long-standard dye-ink photo printer set of CcMmYK. The XP-15000 drops the light cyan and light magenta, and adds gray and red.* It's nice to see some innovation in this segment. The list prince is $350. Here is the press release:

https://news.epson.com/news/expression-photo-hd-xp-15000-wide-format-printer

and here is the page on the XP-15000:

https://epson.com/For-Home/Printers/Photo/Expression-Photo-HD-XP-15000-Wide-format-Printer/p/C11CG43201

Generally, I struggle to understand why anyone would pay $350 for an XP-15000 (or would have paid $320 for an Artisan 1430) when the Canon Pro-100 is readily available for a net of $150. But IMO the XP-15000's ace up its sleeve is its small size: at less than 19 inches wide and less than 13 inches deep, its footprint is less than two-thirds of the Pro-100's. So if space is a big issue, the XP-15000 may be a better choice.

* Interestingly, Canon made a similar change in 2009. Their former basic dye-ink photo printer inkset consisted of cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta, yellow, and black. In 2009, at the same time the ChromaLife 100+ inks replaced the original ChromaLife 100 inks, Canon dropped the light cyan and light magenta, and added gray. Interestingly very recently Canon dropped gray and added blue. Of course, the Canon printers with the CMYKG inkset have mostly the letter / A4-size all-in-ones, the iP8720 / iP8750 / iP8760 being the notable exception.

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Doug Gray

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Re: Epson XP-15000 announced, nobody noticed?
« Reply #1 on: December 10, 2017, 01:44:30 am »

I love how marketers tout an ultra wide color gamut and thus how nice the skin colors are as if one has anything at all to do with the other.

I am curious as to what the gamut looks like and more curious as to how accurately it can print in gamut colors.
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MHMG

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Re: Epson XP-15000 announced, nobody noticed?
« Reply #2 on: December 10, 2017, 11:27:38 am »

I love how marketers tout an ultra wide color gamut and thus how nice the skin colors are as if one has anything at all to do with the other.

I am curious as to what the gamut looks like and more curious as to how accurately it can print in gamut colors.

Red and orange inks are used in certain printers not only to extend some gamut in those hues, but also to "fill in" the dot structure when the driver is engineered to use those inks when making lower chroma orange colors which is in essence what skin tone values are. It is a particularly useful strategy to get finer overall "continuous tone" in those skin tones on printers that have dropped the LC and LM channels to accommodate other colors like mid level grays, gloss optimizers, red and blue ink channels, etc. One upside or downside can be light fastness of the skin tones depending on whether the orange/red inks are more stable or less stable the the magenta and yellow inks for which they are being substituted in the printer drivers ink blending algorithms. The Epson P400 is an excellent example of this strategy as are the P7000/9000 series with HDX ink sets. Also, the Canon Pro-1000, 2000, 4000, are adding the red ink into skin tones, possibly more so than the older X400 models they replaced.

cheers,
Mark
http:www.aardenburg-imaging.com
« Last Edit: December 10, 2017, 11:31:37 am by MHMG »
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Doug Gray

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Re: Epson XP-15000 announced, nobody noticed?
« Reply #3 on: December 10, 2017, 12:24:55 pm »

Red and orange inks are used in certain printers not only to extend some gamut in those hues, but also to "fill in" the dot structure when the driver is engineered to use those inks when making lower chroma orange colors which is in essence what skin tone values are. It is a particularly useful strategy to get finer overall "continuous tone" in those skin tones on printers that have dropped the LC and LM channels to accommodate other colors like mid level grays, gloss optimizers, red and blue ink channels, etc. One upside or downside can be light fastness of the skin tones depending on whether the orange/red inks are more stable or less stable the the magenta and yellow inks for which they are being substituted in the printer drivers ink blending algorithms. The Epson P400 is an excellent example of this strategy as are the P7000/9000 series with HDX ink sets. Also, the Canon Pro-1000, 2000, 4000, are adding the red ink into skin tones, possibly more so than the older X400 models they replaced.

cheers,
Mark
http:www.aardenburg-imaging.com

Interesting. My two, somewhat long in the tooth, printers are examples of this. The 9800 is a classic with 3 levels of Ks, and LM, LC while the 9500 has 2 levels of K and dropped the LM and LC in favor of adding R and G.

Examining prints of the classic Kodak PDI 4 kid's faces, I cannot tell which print was made by which printer unless I look at gloss variations or examine them with a magnifier. All the images are well within the gamut of both printers and both do an equivalent job of rendering skin tones smoothly. Under some magnification I prefer the 9800. I subscribe it more to the 9800's diffusion pattern but it may also be due to the R and G replacing the LC and LM. The 9500's is more regular and less subtle.

The major difference between the two printers is apparent when not using color management and letting the printer print images from sRGB using printer manages color. The 9500 pushes greens in particular to higher L* and much more saturated greens. As much as 20 dE76. Makes snapshot prints with foliage "pop" compared to the 9800 using the same process. Using color management, the canned 9500 profiles also push but a bit less.

Interestingly, the 9500's gamut is smaller than the 9800 in the greens when L* is less than 50 in spite of having a dedicated G ink. It only pushes the G part of the gamut beyond the 9800 from L* of 50 to about 75.

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Mark D Segal

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Re: Epson XP-15000 announced, nobody noticed?
« Reply #4 on: December 10, 2017, 12:27:41 pm »



I am curious as to what the gamut looks like and more curious as to how accurately it can print in gamut colors.

For the gamut, I suppose you could download the driver, unpack it for the profiles and examine them in ColorThink Pro - that's free and straightforward for those who have the application. Accuracy evaluation, however, as you most likely know would require having the printer, printing test patches with known reference values and measuring them.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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Mark D Segal

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Re: Epson XP-15000 announced, nobody noticed?
« Reply #5 on: December 10, 2017, 12:42:58 pm »

Just went to the product page to look it over. Quite fantastic that there is NO information about the # of ml ink per cartridge. Judging by the price it's probably low, which means that the cost per ml is probably relatively high; but I'm speculating based on extrapolating from other experience. A whole methodological tract is available from Epson's website about how they test for yield per cartridge, which is interesting in its own right, but specifically uninformative. I also notice in the specs that the supported papers include only the lighter-weight ones - none of the papers we commonly refer to as Fine Art papers (such as the Epson Legacy line) are mentioned. So I don't think this printer is intended to be in the P600/P800 league, and would need to be evaluated relative to is own market niche and purposes.
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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Wayne Fox

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Re: Epson XP-15000 announced, nobody noticed?
« Reply #6 on: December 10, 2017, 10:03:19 pm »

this is a consumer grade printer utilizing Claria inks which other than the black are dye rather than pigment inks.  certainly not in the same league as the p600 or p800 printers.
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NAwlins_Contrarian

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Re: Epson XP-15000 announced, nobody noticed?
« Reply #7 on: December 12, 2017, 12:14:18 am »

Obviously yes, this is a dye-ink printer intended mainly for printing on coated (glossy, semi-gloss, luster) paper. Sure, that interests some and not others. It prints up to 13x19 inches, so IMO that puts it in the 'enthusiast' category, even though it is not a pigment-ink printer like the P600 or P800. Now onto a couple of the points that struck me as more interesting.

Quote
For the gamut, I suppose you could download the driver, unpack it for the profiles and examine them in ColorThink Pro - that's free and straightforward for those who have the application.

Yes, I'm kind-of hoping that someone will do that in the not-too-distant future. If nothing else, I find interesting the evaluation of the interaction of ink colors (both number and choices), printer resolution (ratio of dpi to ppi, i.e., how may ink dots to simulate each ostensibly continuous-tone pixel), gamut, and (getting more subjective) tonal smoothness.

Quote
Quite fantastic that there is NO information about the # of ml ink per cartridge. Judging by the price it's probably low, which means that the cost per ml is probably relatively high; but I'm speculating based on extrapolating from other experience. A whole methodological tract is available from Epson's website about how they test for yield per cartridge, which is interesting in its own right, but specifically uninformative.

That lack of information seems to be the norm in this class and below, with that information very difficult to get. In some cases the UK or EU support sites have such information, probably required by law or regulation, and assuming that the cartridges contain equal ink (even when designated with different models), you get a figure in ml.* Also--and I realize this is getting less precise, especially in models with different inksets and/or resolutions--you can use page yield data to compare an older model with known capacities to a newer one.

* Example: the XP-15000 can use some of the cartridges made for the recently-introduced XP-8500 all-in-one (obviously not the light cyan and light magenta). The Epson UK / EU website (at https://www.epson.co.uk/products/printers/inkjet-printers/consumer/expression-photo-xp-8500?search=XP-8500#accessories) lists those cartridges as 5.5 ml for black; 4.8 ml for light cyan and light magenta; 4.1 ml for cyan, magenta, and yellow; and for the XL capacity versions, respectively, 11.2, 10.3, and 9.3 ml. So it looks like Epson is trying to even out the prints-per-cartridge number for each color. And then if you just go to that ink page, it lists too the gray and red inks for the XP-15000, which are only available in XL versions, at 11.2 and 10.2 (not 10.3) ml respectively.
« Last Edit: December 12, 2017, 12:18:19 am by NAwlins_Contrarian »
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