I hope to comment at some length on the Epson P10000 (and P20000) at some point in the future. Time is never sufficient to do everything I want to do.
For now, a couple of brief comments on the P10K that we've been running for a few months now. As background, we're a large format digital print shop that strives for the highest quality we can achieve, without implementing processes that would cost more than 95% of our customers could afford.
We run multiple elderly 9880's, only a single remaining 7900 (having disposed of our other x900's), multiple 11880's, some other random stuff. And now a P10K, plus a P20K that we just took delivery of.
First, these new models increase the trend towards electronic "fly by wire" controls for everything. Gone are the days where you can just load or eject media by a manual lever control and a single electronic button press in a matter of a few seconds, for example. These new printers suffer from an increasing issue I find with many modern high tech products. I call it nagware and "verbing instead of working". The printer takes a lot more button pushes to get common things done -- invoking a function, then confirming we want to do it, then confirming we really want to do it, then confirming that we actually want to start doing it, etc. And we spend more time standing at the control panel while the printer says "waking up", "preparing", "waiting", blah blah blah -- verbing of some kind, instead of actually working.
Once the printer is actually doing something, it's really fast and smooth. The new head is massive, but the printer feels more solid than ever while that giant head is moving around. It's also much quieter than before. The rotary cutter is fast and solid. We're not finding any feed or head strike issues so far, except with really aggravating papers that always used to cause issues, such as Ilford Gold Fibre Silk, Hahnmuhle Fine Art Baryta, and the like.
I've made a bunch of custom profiles and the new inkset is a welcome update. Much better Dmax and colour gamut compared to our stalwart 11880's. I'd say more or less as good as the x900 inkset for gamut, but with better colour gamut in the deeper shadow tones. The 4th grey ink is a win, I believe. I haven't tried any hard core B&W testing yet, but in routine printing we're seeing good things that I attribute to having that extra shade of grey. I anticipate good things from the reformulated yellow ink, if independent testing confirms the improved yellow longevity that Epson is claiming. The shift to a 300/600 PPI head design instead of the traditional 360/720 PPI Epson has used for everything else has brought no downside that I can see. Things still look as detailed and smooth as ever, absent a controlled test with a loupe.
The new print area in the hardware is arranged horizontally, as opposed to at an angle like all previous Epson large format models of the past 10+ years. This means paper is fed in & down through the loading slot, then goes through an angled bend to get leveled out under the print head, with prints feeding straight out the front still on a horizontal orientation. This cause a bit of difference in handling some papers, but doesn't seem to have a significant plus or minus in operation, so far. A minor downside is that it appears 11 inches is now the minimum length of media that can be printed, probably because of the feed mechanism changes. On the upside, large rigid plates or heavy card stock can be dealt with more easily since they load & print completely horizontally, given sufficient space in front and in back.
Bugs -- there have been a few. For the first time in I don't know how many years, we had multiple incidents where the printer got confused while trying to load media with multiple jobs queued up, and started printing when no paper was actually loaded. This liberally sprayed ink all over the interior until the job could be killed. This happened several times until we narrowed it down to one specific situation for sure -- queuing up multiple jobs on cut sheet stock, something we don't do any more now. When we need to print on cut sheets, we run the jobs one at a time. We've already had one or two driver updates for the P10K, I'm betting there will be a firmware update before long as well. One example of a more benign bug is that on Windows, the Epson printer driver enforces the 11 inch minimum media length I mentioned above, changing any smaller dimension entered to 11 before commencing the print job. On Mac, the driver will let you enter a smaller dimension and submit the print job, but the print is then oddly rotated and truncated. It's impossible to get a correct print until you put at least 11 inches in for the media length. These things demonstrate the continued decline of vendor QC, and the role of paying customers as beta testers.
Ink supply was a bit of an issue to start. We took delivery of the P10K with its pathetically small starter ink cartridges, which lasted about 24 hours. That was how long it took before one cart was depleted far enough that the obligatory head clog couldn't be cleared. The printer was then unusable as it appeared that Epson Canada had no supply of P10K / P20K ink anywhere in the country. So our brand new device sat collecting dust for over a month while we raised hell weekly through our vendors, trying to get ink. When we ordered the P20K, we told everybody involved that if a full ink set didn't arrive conjointly with the printer, we would refuse delivery.
My final comment for now is on clogging. Yes, the P10K continues to clog as much as any Epson we've ever run. I've disabled as many of the auto-cleaning functions as possible, because if we didn't, our initial observation is that the machine would spend an enormous amount of time trying to run self-cleaning cycles, many of which would prove to be ineffective anyway. Even with everything cut to a minimum, the printer constantly tells us that it has detected a clog that automatic cleaning couldn't clear up, and so the printer stops to give us the chance to clean again or continue printing. This requires manual intervention on the control panel. If we cancel the job and run a nozzle check, I'd say about 80% of the time there's no clog in evidence. But quite frequently, whether the auto-clog detect has found something or not, a clog will develop. Often it linearly spans 2 - 3 contiguous nozzle slots. Rather frequently, multiple channels will clog at once. At least now the paired channel cleaning function allows us to select one, several or all channels for cleaning, which speeds up cleaning with less wasted ink than before, where it was either clean all channels, or only a single channel pair. Clogging happens pretty regularly, so we run manual nozzle checks with the requirement for manual head cleanings all the time. We manage environmental dust, temperature and humidity as well as we reasonably can without running a clean-room type of environment.
Time will tell whether the new 600 PPI head is more reliable than the disastrous x900 heads. If it is, and if Epson can work out some of the driver and firmware bugs soon, then on the whole we'll consider the P10K / P20K printers a worthwhile upgrade. The most significant benefit we see on day 1 is from the new inkset. But the printer currently is not without its annoyances, and on the clogging front it appears to be no better than any other past model. Based on what we're seeing with these, I don't know that we'll ever bother to try the P9000 or other smaller models, but we'll see. We print a lot, and we print large a lot, so the production throughput that the P10K / P20K are designed to deliver make them the natural fit for us.
I will say that we do plan to evaluate the Canon PRO-4000 in the new year...