Hi all,
I'm in the market for a pro/semipro A3 color printer. I've read possibly everything there is to read on the R2400, the B8190/B8850 and the Pixma Pro 9500, which all seem to produce excellent results. However, in user forums and user reviews I read a lot of disappointed comments about the Canon and the HP, with people saying things like "the pros go Epson and so should you". On the other hand, I gather that the Epson is good if you use it regularly, on an almost daily basis (both from a functional viewpoint as well as for reasons of ink cost). This is not what I intend to do with it.
What I'm looking for is a solution which produces quality results for someone who's not a pro but who is a bit retentive when it comes to color and detail reproduction. I do a lot of color but I'll prefer a printer which does excellent black and white and less-than-excellent color to anything else, as my black and white prints are very important to me.
I got so confused reading the dozens of reviews on the three printers mentioned above that I thought I might as well get the larger and costlier Stylus Pro 3800, just because it seems to have a perfect operating record.
For the price and image quality the Epson 3800 will not be beat.
For construction build , the 3800 seems to have no serious faults either.
If there were something that is much improved but not yet eliminated by design is the black switching. I don't think for a serious print it is a problem, but if you just want to try different paper styles then switching from matte to photo black inks is too costly to experiment.
In terms of clog free printing all three brands have done well. HP have the only hardware solution with a drop detector and daily maintenance routine for which reduced nozzle output can easily be remapped to other parallel nozzles. This is nice but will cost you in the end for non use.
The HP has one of the nicest screening on matte paper, which is very neutral when printing with black inks only. On photo media though there is a cast to the B&W. The provided profiles on both Epson and HP are near perfect, so colour printing is very good without much effort at all.
Epson have always had a finer grain or pitch, and are usually slightly ahead in smoothness and detail.
The Epson 2880 is a nice little printer but does have very tiny cartridges. If you need an A3+ and need roll format, this is the only way to go. IF you want more economy and can stick with sheet feed, the 3800 is the best deal going.
I would wait until next week though to see what is announced at PPE in NYC.