Im really discusted with the whole Z3200 thing.
There is an option to purge the inks - and even if not that then you can change the lines and the print head and there is ABSOLUTELY NO GOOD REASON that this chromatic red can't be made available for the z3100 owners.
I am _NOT_ buying another Z printer - newer model or whatever ... but I might go out and get a different brand
Z3100 owners should really band together and b!t%h and complain about this.
I can't say as I agree. Each generation of inkjets has its own dithering algorithms and crossover points set into hardware/firmware, with little margin for drastic alteration like a completely new ink color. All of the current large format inkjets have their strengths and weaknesses. I worked with Epsons for years, and struggled to get decent results way back when from the original pigment ink printer, the 2000P. Anyone who printed with one of them can tell you about the horrific metamerism and weak blacks it produced. By the first generation 'ultrachrome' printers (2200/7600/9600) you could get quite good color prints on rag paper, but neutral black & white remained a real can of worms and the black ink swap just made me crazy. Epson's K3 printers were better, the vivid magenta K3 better yet...but still with the black swap thing! I do a lot of black & white on various papers, and this is a deal-breaker for me.
Nowadays we have some real choices, and what's best depends on what your own images need. I have the original Z3100 without APS, and my Epsons have all been gathering dust since I bought it. On the right paper, I get very good reds and oranges out of it. Could I get more red saturation out of an Epson 7880? No doubt. But blues/greens are just fantastic from the Z3100; I get cobalt blue skies that really look right, something I could never get from the Epsons I used, and green foliage is perfect. And for all my black & white work, there's nothing better. HP's Vivera black/grey inks are markedly more neutral than Epson's K3 of any flavor, the d-max on matte/rag papers is visibly darker, and...no more black swapping! Moreover, I couldn't be happier with the built-in spectro. The profiles it yields for 3rd party papers have consistently met my needs.
So I guess if I were printing predominantly neon fall color shots or lots of red rock Western landscapes, one of the newer Epsons would be the first choice. But unless I was willing to spend an additional $1,000 for a 7900, I'd
still be stuck with black swapping. Hmmph.
Anyway, I'd rather be making some really beautiful prints than obsessing about the last 2% of inkset red gamut. Too much like pixel-peeping with new D-SLR's.