Well, its arrival was inexplicably delayed but our P10K finally arrived yesterday. I spent the afternoon getting it set up and configured, and then printing a few profiling test targets. Today I'm generating the custom profiles for the papers I managed to print test charts for before the starter ink cartridges ran out.
The new printer does look very good so far. Before continuing on that, a quick side note -- the initial irritation that I expected to see was every bit as irritating as anticipated. The starter ink carts lasted not even 24 hours, with 24 letter sized profile target sheets printed (4 sheets per paper, 6 papers printed). Of course most of the ink went to the initial charging of the lines. But a surprising amount has been dumped straight into the waste tank by what appears to me to be extremely aggressive and lengthy autocleaning cycles. The righthand waste tank is already 99% full and will have to be swapped as soon as we get new, full-size carts and do the first thing that triggers a cleaning. So my feeling is the ink-wasting aspect of the Epsons that we all know has not really changed (or, certainly not for the better) with the new P10K / P20K models.
Speed is extremely fast. I'm not measuring any page size print times yet (see ink issue above), but I really had to watch the printer to catch the roll cuts before they ended up on the floor. The head in this thing is massive and it's covering a massive amount of paper area, compared to previous generations. So the production times should be excellent.
The paper path is different than before. Gone are the days of the angled, straight-through feed. Paper rolls are now loaded on the spindle-less hubs in the top carriage, and feed down through a fly-by-wire loading system similar to the x900 series. But the paper then curves perhaps 35 degrees, and runs across a flat platen under the horizontally-mounted head, feeding out the front horizontally. For thick media that can't curve this way, there's a new front-loaded flat paper path, which I haven't tried yet (no ink). But the roll feed seems to work without drama, though I do miss the days of manual release levers that were faster to deal with than the often painfully slow fly-by-wire systems seem to be.
There seem to be lots of other small, incremental improvements in there. And some changes that may need further examination, e.g. some very fine, toothed pizza wheels at the front paper exit.
From the custom profiles done this morning, gamut and dmax on some papers looks to be significantly improved vs. the old 11880 ink set. On some other papers, though, the improvement in both gamut and dmax is negligible. I thought I might immediately see a more marked improved from the new black, and extra grey. More analysis will be needed on this topic.
No ability to look at any print quality comparisons yet, since I'm now waiting on full size ink cartridges. They were ordered along with the new printer, but for some reason didn't arrive. When they get here, I'll be able to really put the machine through some paces, and have more to say about it...