epson P10000 review

[MikeIvanitsky]

I am at the point of replacing an Epson 7900 with one of the newer models. My choice has come down to a P7000/P9000 vs. a P10000. Much of the work I do is monochrome, so the extra gray ink in the P10000 is compelling to me. I also do color landscape work, so the possibly expanded gamut of the P7000/P9000 is also appealing. I have not been unsatisfied with the 7900, but want the best output quality possible for this upgrade cycle. I am unable to find comparison gamut plots for the two printer series, nor can I find any reports of comparisons in monochrome. Has anyone really compared the printers of the current generation yet? Salespeople, of course, are useless in this matter.

Any opinions are appreciated!

[datro]

Mike,

Like you, I own a 7900.  Earlier this summer I lost the Green channel on the printer's second head (which I had installed to replace the original head which also failed in the green channel two years ago).  Other than these head failures, the printer has been fantastic since Dec. 2008.  Most of my own work is B&W which means I could just continue using the printer with ABW, QTR, or Piezography, but I also print color for other artists and photographers and so I needed to make a decision on a new printer.  Additionally I have demand for doing larger prints than my 7900 can produce and I had been thinking about an upgrade anyway.

Initially I was very curious about the P10000 since it has quad K inks, and of course it is a 44" printer and has new head technology.  But after a lot of research and following what little "real user" data was available, I made the decision to move to the SureColor P9000.  I have been very happy with that decision.  Key factors for me:

• It appears Epson has introduced the additional gray ink mainly to improve gradients in color.  Nowhere can I find any evidence that Epson is focusing on improved B&W printing with the additional gray ink.  It is not at all clear that ABW on the P10000 can even use the additional shade.
• Roy Harrington has said it is unlikely that QTR will/could work with the P10000.  Although things can change, it's a complete unknown at this point and I am doubtful it would ever be supported by QTR.
• Epson markets the P10000 printer with a primary focus on speed.  Clearly the machine is optimized for speed and high volume printing more than anything else.  Speed is not a problem for me.
• The P10000 is way more expensive than the P9000.
• While not a major issue, the P10000 resolution is slightly less than on the P9000 (again, it is speed optimized).

Luckily I was able to arrange space in my studio so I could accommodate both printers, and my tentative plan is put the new Piezography Pro Edition inks in the 7900 when they are available in a few weeks.  The P9000 has been solid so far.  I like the updated menus and improved display information, and it has the new HDX ink with improved black and yellow.  It's a small thing, but the nozzle check print now prints the colors in the same sequence as laid out on the head, and also includes the date printed...a nice improvement in usability.  I could never figure out why they didn't do it this way in the earlier printers.

Of course, the head in the P9000 is exactly the same head as in the earlier printers, so there is still some risk of issues.  But the printer firmware includes a different approach for head cleaning with some automated cleaning that did not exist in the earlier printers, so I believe there is a good chance that head life will be improved on these printers.

Hope this helps.

Dave

[deanwork]

All I can say is if Epson can't even develop a workable monochrome software solution for an onboard quad gray inkset just sitting there for them to use, with these great heads, with all the toning capabilities of the more stable color channels, then they are seriously screwed up. It would go well beyond the realm of laughable into the realm of incomprehensible. At this point who knows.

But I don't think that is going to be the case. My God the True Black and White people in LA have done this a decade ago with the Canon and MIS inks in a little business composed of 3 people. Same with Jon Cone and his tiny operation who developed software nearly 20 years ago that created a beautiful rich quad linearity.

I"m probably going to look for a used Epson for the new Piezography inkset also and keep my 9890 for the K7 Carbon. QTR is going to be a big problem it looks like for any of the new Epson printers. Epson has put something on the main board to lock out any non Epson ink carts for one thing. Studio Print will work with them, but that's another major investment for one extra gray, as nice as it would be, I'm not going there, if ABW is anything like what it has been in the past the 10K will be out for me too.

[MikeIvanitsky]

Dave and Deanwork,

Thanks for your replies. I don't have the space for a dedicated monochrome printer, otherwise, there are excellent solutions available for that, obviously. I am looking for the best all in one solution for monochrome and color needs. If the color gamut is at least better than the 7900, then I am probably happy going with the P10000, given the other (potential) advantages, real or imagined. The speed is nice, certainly, but not necessary in my world. Better heads are greatly important, and the ability for the heads to self-maintain without having to always put a sheet in the printer is a good thing. The slight loss of resolution is not something that I or my clients will ever see at any print size. The cost differential between P9000 and P10000 is not huge, and will be offset by half of an inkset. As long as the inks continue to be usable for a long time, which has always been the case, regardless of package labeling, I see no disadvantage.

I do not want a printer that has severely less gamut in color than the P9000, as when I do color, this is an important factor. With regard to monochrome, I  would hope to see improvements in ABW, but no one has admitted to doing a test of this yet, on glossy media with PK ink.

[narikin]

Actually, this is not hard at all.
A Chinese inkjet printer with an epson printhead will do the job easily
as long as, for example, get Roy or Ergosoft to support that printer, things will turns out easy.
I have once talked to Jon when he was visiting Asia, he said his dream printer would be a flatbed just like the flatbed uv printer.
And I think this is coming to be true for now on since there are a lot of Chinese company are making these flatbed printer with piezo print head.
as long as we have a good software that supports these printers, it shouldn't be hard at all.

aaron

Hi Aaron,   got any links to these Chinese flatbed Piezo head machines?

I'm looking at Swiss Q, but would rather find something more affordable, and designed for quality rather than speed.

thanks

[deanwork]

Epson's marketing talk is as obtuse with the P10K as it is with most of their printers.

For me it's all about two things, the newly designed big heads, and the extra gray channel, allowing a more dimensional and linear bw inkset, especially on gloss fiber media with the new inks.

The heads Could be a Big deal for Epson, beyond speed. These are the same heads as in their flagship P20K so they are serious about the design on some level.

What we don't know is 1. are the heads really less susceptible to the clogging, pressure, and ink starvation issues of the previous designs. ( if they went back to the engineering of the original 10K and the Roland heads that also used them, and improved upon that these heads by making them 2440 rather than 1440, that would be a huge improvement). I"ve been waiting for that for a decade.

Or, do they only improve the nozzle check situation by making the system pump more and more, and more ink through the heads on a weekly basis automatically . They reduced the ink cost on these printers and only have big carts. We don't know yet.

2. Did they really spend time designing a decent ABW method or is it pretty much the same output as the less expensive 44" models which themselves may or may not have any added improvement beyond dmax, which I don't see as a factor. Yea I know a lot of people will say they are totally happy with a tritone configuration using one black and two grays. I'm not one of those people. I grew up in the silver darkroom when there was quality silver content in the products, and I know what excellence looks like. Look this is 2016 not the 1990s.

It will be interesting to watch. In the mean time, I'm holding on to my wallet. It's always best to wait a year if you can. It really takes that long to sort all this out. Apparently we have three companies out there now competing for this "art"  and design market and that's a good thing. I'd like to see someone come up with a modular high-end printing system that you could use with any inkset and switch out components yourself when they need it. That's probably a pipe dream, but who knows.

john

[narikin]

Don't forget that color printing is 95+% of the usage of these machines, and only a small minority obsess over black and white output.

Yes, they have put 4 iteration of black on there for linearity, but the machine is not dedicated to B&W, and it would be wrong to assume it is. This and the bigger P20000 are intended as a speed & volume quality output machine with (hopefully) better costs due to the reduced inkset and large carts.  That combination of speed and quality is new to the market, and that is where the real breakthrough is here.

For those not concerned with speed, or wanting the absolute largest gamut they can get, there are the 7900/9900 options.  If you want that and 60+" width, then you have a small problem, which hopefully Canon will fix.

[deanwork]

That sounds exactly like what the Epson marketing people who don't know jack about software would say.

Well that's just silly. This exact same argument is what people said before Epson finally after years and years put 2 gray channels in the ultrachrome inkset as apposed to just one "light" gray of the 9600. There are thousands of artists, many of them photographers, who I talk to every week, who care a lot about high-end permanent digital monochrome, especially when they've actually SEEN it. And HOW are people going to use a dedicated monochrome inkset if Epson locks them out of using third party carts or even accessing QTR? Use an old Epson with bad heads. That's not good either. To ask for bw photography capability equal to or surpassing what was available in the 1940s, is, I'm sorry, not too much to ask and I don't consider myself a fanatic in any respect in regard to bw. This is 2016.

IF you have the technology to accomplish a quad configuration, which they do, and don't provide a workable software to run it, I"m sorry that's just crazy, however you want to spin it.

I'm not saying that is the case with the P10k-20K. We don't know yet.

 Even if Epson does screw up and doesn't offer a really improved ABW, someone will come along and find a way to drive the inks. But that could take a couple of years and they would have to go through grief to accomplish it.

The Epson 11880 has been used in a major way all over the world for extremely high-end museum level projects, thousands of them monochrome work, and giant monochrome at that. This new P20K technology is replacing and "upgrading" that system. It should be better, not just faster.

All of this capability of the Epson printers is a software issue really. For instance you have 10 channel printers with an Orange and Green that could also be swapped out for additional gray inks just by updating the software. But Epson will not allow anyone to have access to their codes and firmware to do anything like that. That's stupid. So really what I'm saying is the technology has been there for a long time, they just don't care enough about black and white to allow it to happen. They say exactly what the previous poster just said, " most people don't care". Right. Thousands of us who have been artists for decades are not "most people".

john

[iCanvas]

I am very pleased with my P10K printer. I have compared prints from my previous 9900 and I like the P10K better. The blacks are more lustrous. I very rarely do a head cleaning. However, the tendency of the printer is to do a cleaning after, say 5 prints. If you have prints continuously coming off the printer, it will not do a head cleaning. But if there is a break, say 5 minutes between prints, the printer will want to do a cleaning. I did an experiment and shut the printer down before it would do a cleaning. I restarted the printer and ran the "Printless nozzle check" and the check came up with no clogs. I am also satisfied to print at 600dpi. Have compared prints at both 600 and 1200dpi and can't tell the difference on canvas. I do not print B/W so I can't help anyone there. I would highly recommend this printer. The P10K also has a fast start up time.

I use Macs and there is no Epson software for the Mac to read the printer hard drive. I was able to run Virtual Box and install a Windows operating system to read the hard drive. You will need an ethernet connection for it to work. Hope that helps somebody.

Gar

[narikin]

. They say exactly what the previous poster just said, " most people don't care". Right. Thousands of us who have been artists for decades are not "most people".

john

Please read my post again - it certainly does not say "most people don't care", and it is wrong to put quotation marks around an invented quote!

I simply pointed out that the vast majority of work done on the P10000 and P20000 will be in color, and it is wrong to assume that it should be oriented for black and white, and that Epson should concentrate on that.  Is it capable of doing good black and white? - maybe so, a nice fillip if it can be achieved, and maybe it will be in the future, but should Epson be castigated for not zeroing in on that? - not in my opinion.

All my output is fine art too, so I know a *lot* of other artists working in the same area, at the highest level - form MoMA to Guggenheim to the Tate to the Whitney, LACMA, etc. Only 1 of them does b&w. Nothing wrong with that at all, just saying - it's horses for courses.

Good luck.

[deanwork]

I'm sorry, I wasn't quoting you in that most people sentence. But that is the core of what I have heard for the last 15 years or so.

What I was simply saying, which seems like common sense to a lot of the people I know, who have been doing digital pigment printing since the very beginning, is there is no reason in the world why, with the technology we have had for a long time why they can't do both.

The hardware has been there for a long time, and Epson deserves a huge amount of credit for delivering this hardware, but these printers are capable of so much more adaptability than has been provided with their own drivers. My complaint is if they are not going to allow third parties to offer the superior monochrome solution for their print heads, then the least they could so is not lock out great software capability that more serious people have created long ago. They have come down hard on ErgoSoft Studio Print for allowing them to work with Piezograpy environments on Epson printers like we used to, to the point where Ergosoft could no longer give support for the quad and 7 channel sets available. Now QTR is locked out. The only reason Epson would do that is keep someone from showing them publicly that ABW is an inferior solution. Hell they could reverse engineer QTR and do it themselves. I don't care. My real point was that now Epson does have a truly balanced quad gray inkset, it's just nuts for it not work the way it should. And once again I'm not critiquing the "improved" ABW software before I've seen it. But from past experience, monochrome has been a very low priority for them. That was understandable 15 years ago,  but not now.

When some really great printmaker gets ahold of these P printers and does serious reviews we will know more, cause Epson is not going to do it. If they did, and there is a big step forward for them, they would make more money. I know that for sure.

[Farmer]

Note that changing colours/blacks/etc is not "just" a software upgrade/change.  It's a big deal of a software upgrade/change.  Ask any RIP vendor.  When you are dealing with LUTs with hundreds of billions of combinations (between colours and dot sizes) it's a big deal.

[deanwork]

It is absolutely not that big of a deal for a corporation like Epson, not at all.

When Bowhaus in LA can make and release True Black and White for the 12 channel Canon IPF printers in a couple of months after the printers release (with Canon's co-operaton, encouragement, and support ) Epson can do it in a decade. With True Black and White, a very inexpensive rip, you can easily turn off all the color channels and only use the black and grey channels and linearize them by simply plugging in your I1 spectro, clicking a button to display and print their target. You can make your own profiles in 15 minutes for any media with both PK and MK ink.  It comes with free profiles for many papers. With TBW you can also easily click on any of the color channels and pull up the sliders visually to add more or less of that ink. So in effect you can design your own monochrome profiles by using any of the ink hues you want ( like QTR ) and save presets for future use, ....neutral, warm neutral, warm, cool,sepia, etc.  for any number of PK and MK papers. You do this while soft proofing on the screen within their software to select the hue. Basically a child could use the workflow.

Hell if Epson would design their grays to neutral in the first place like Canon and HP, you could shut off the other channels altogether. That's really would be a no brainer then.

Maybe they improved ABW in a big way for the P10K. I doubt it, but I'm still hoping.

john

Note that changing colours/blacks/etc is not "just" a software upgrade/change.  It's a big deal of a software upgrade/change.  Ask any RIP vendor.  When you are dealing with LUTs with hundreds of billions of combinations (between colours anproofd dot sizes) it's a big deal.

[Farmer]

/sigh

Sure, it's so easy that they needed the direct support of a massive corporation like Canon.

If you want a RIP, buy a RIP and do what you want to do no problem.  But if you want a manufacturer to create and support (and it's the latter that's the killer) something like this, then it's a big deal, whether you believe it or not :-)

[deanwork]

Canon did nothing to create True Black and White software. All they did was allow Bowhaus to use the codes. The Canon black and white solution was a bad as Epson ABW, so it was in their benefit to let these guys create and sell this grayscale workflow with toning option. Canon didn't pay for that, or help in any technical way,  they simply allowed it to exist, and why not, it's a no brainer. These guys made it for themselves, they are printmakers, not corporate people. 

Same thing with Roy Harrington and QTR for Epson printers. He provided a great capability when Epson had absolutely nothing, for years and years and years. I was there. I used it on the 9600 printers I had at the time and it transformed a nothing monochrome capability to something quite decent for the time, even though Epson only had one gray at the time. If Epson supported QTR, they would have an amazing quad printer built right into a full color set with the P10K.  That's not my opinion, anyone who is serious about monochrome printing knows that. But they won't, it would make their engineers look sad and lazy. But they would sell more printers, that's for sure and it would be good for em.

john

/sigh

Sure, it's so easy that they needed the direct support of a massive corporation like Canon.

If you want a RIP, buy a RIP and do what you want to do no problem.  But if you want a manufacturer to create and support (and it's the latter that's the killer) something like this, then it's a big deal, whether you believe it or not :-)

[Farmer]

Well I guess you know more than Epson, well done!

[deanwork]

A lot of people know a lot more about monochrome inkjet imaging than Epson, a lot. Yea I've been printing monochrome for 40 years on the very high-end. A lot of us have.

 Not that there aren't people there on staff that don't know, but the decision makers and sales promoters have no idea. Main reason is only a tiny percentage of photographers even have any input there.

Well I guess you know more than Epson, well done!

[BobDavid]

I came really close to buying the 10000 when my 9900 needed a new head.
What I did instead was repair my 9900 ($2950 for a new head and capping station)
Also purchased a used 9890 still under it's 3 year warranty for $1500.
The new 10000 with a full set of 700ml carts was just under $9000.
I paid $4450 which is half of the 10000 and I now have 2 44" printers in excellent shape.
What tipped the hat was the 10,000 ml of K3 inks that I have here that can be used in both printers. (Sorry, know I have said that before.)
That whole thing of diminishing returns also plays into this.
Are the new ones better, no doubt. I would have loved it for sure.
Is it $4500 better, not for me.

I had a 9900 that died (bad head) after two years (I am convinced that the orange and the green channels were the culprits). I've now had my 7890 for almost three years. The X890 printers, in my opinion, are far less prone to clogging. I hardly ever run cleaning cycles on the 7890. I leave it on 24/7. It is plugged into a dedicated UPS. If the machine sits idle for more than five days, I run a nozzle test to monitor the head. If a channel is clogged (very rarely), I will print a file that matches the clogged head and if that doesn't clear up the problem, I'll run a "pair clean."  Then, if a message comes up saying the "clean" did not work, I decline the request to run it through another cleaning cycle. I then print another nozzle test. If I see that some of the blockage has cleared, I create a file in photo shop, select and then fill the area with a color that matches the clogged channel. I may need to run a few prints and tweak the color in Photoshop a few times, but 95% of the time, this clears the head. Sometimes after a pair cleaning, another channel "clogs" up. I attribute that to a bubble in the line and print out a file that matches that color. I avoid cleaning cycles as they are destructive. I rarely power the printer down because it will often initiate a cleaning cycle when it is powered back up.

The X900 printers included orange and green channels for graphic and industrial designers who needed to print the spectrum of PMS colors--a wider gamut than is necessary for extreme high-quality photo printing. I compared at least a dozen prints from the 9900 to those from the 7890 and could not discern a difference. I have an excellent eye for color. I typically score between 5-7 on the X-Rite color chart test.
 

[deanwork]

I agree that the more channels you have on those recent Epsons the more pressure issues you should expect, especially if you don't use them all day everyday. However, my 9890 lost two nozzles completely after two years, so they are far from perfect either.

Eventually we'll all find out how well the new head design functions on the P10K P20K printers. They may have gone a long way to solving most of these issues, and they may not. They may use less ink in cleaning, or they may not. Only time will tell. In the time being, I'll stick with my Canon that I know just works, and pay for the heads once every year or two.

j

[Farmer]

John - I was more referencing your comments about what they should do, from a business perspective.  Also, your general comment about their engineers being sad and lazy was over the top and uncalled for, unless you personally know some and can critique them as such from first hand knowledge.

They may not be producing exactly what you want, but that doesn't make it a mistake :-)