I have two of these now, and it's a mixed bag. I bought them to replace two P-9000's, and because I needed something faster.
First, the P-9570 is fast. There is no question that having twice the speed helps in a production environment. So that part is good. The color is good, although I'm not sure why Epson changed from Light Black and Light Light black to Grey and Light grey. That makes no sense to me, except to make me buy all new ink and sell my P-9000 ink on ebay.
Other than the speed, there are a few nice things about it. It has access to the head, so it can easily be manually cleaned. It has access to the capping station, so keeping that maintained is easier. It has a light in the printer, so it's easier to see what's going on while it's printing. And lastly, you can use photo ink and matte ink without switching inks, and that is a real advantage for those of us that use multiple papers.
But all that being said, my satisfaction with the Epson SureColor P-9570 is very low. I have had service techs out twice now, only to really find out that the troubles I'm seeing are expected behavior. First, it cannot take 75 ft rolls of Moab Entrada. Techs that came out confirmed that they have seen this in the field, and that the P-9570 seems to have a hard time with heavier rolls. What happens is that the P-9570 will only print if the roll cover is closed, and with larger rolls, it ends up stuffing the paper up inside the roll cover, damaging the paper, and costing time and money. Insisting on keeping the cover closed is the root cause of that. And since Epson specifically markets this as a fine art printer, this is an unacceptable shortcoming.
Also, we've had issues for years now with Moab Entrada and Canson Aquarelle and Canson Velin coming off the rolls. They always come off the core towards the end, but with the P-9570, they're coming off the rolls much sooner, and as soon as they do, the printer can't function. It spits out a good 4-5 feet of paper, and then says "paper not detected". And at that point you have to remove the paper (usually with several errors on the control panel), tape the paper to the core again, and then put it back. With previous models, like the Epson 9900 and P-9000, with the cover open, it would send some paper up into the core area, but with the cover open it wasn't an issue. We could continue printing. But with the P-9570, we have had to tape every single roll of paper back onto the core, every single time. It's tedious and time consuming, and it's damaging paper, and costing us employee time and aggravation. And we have two of them, so we know it's not an issue with a particular printer.
LCD menu errors: I have a theory that Epson had a summer intern program the LCD menu panel. I've never seen so many false errors in my life. It will say "close the cover", and then "paper not detected. Open the cover", and other such things. All of it's programming is done around that cover being opened and closed, but it gets confused often, and isn't sure what it wants. So you have to play a game of open the cover, close the cover, until it figures it out. It's a complete waste of time.
Another LCD menu issue is that when you're finished with a roll of paper, and it's ejected, you close the cover, and the LCD menu says "Set Paper". When you press that, it forces you into setting paper. But the Home button doesn't work at that point. There is no way to get out of that menu, so if you want to see the menu, and look at ink levels, etc, then it won't work. You have to set the paper. I called Epson, and they said that was "normal". I did, however, discover a workaround, by taking advantage of the fact that the P-9570 gets confused. If you just open and close the cover a few times, it eventually acts like it has rolled paper in it, and you can access the menu. Opening the cover again causes the "set paper" button to reappear. Clearly the menu on the P-9570 needs to be completely revised. It's just a mess.
Paper Remaining The P-9570 has a new function called paper remaining. When you first put on a roll of paper, you can tell it how much is remaining, and it will keep track for you. On the surface, this is a nice functionality. But in reality, it really only works if you never take the paper off the printer. When you eject a roll, and the paper remaining function is on, the P-9570 prints a bar code kind of thing on the end of the roll, showing how much paper is left. But what we've found is that if you change papers, then put that roll back, it doesn't work. You have to tell it manually how much paper is left by reading the printout, and sometimes it won't let you, giving an error of "value not in range". So it's not actually reading the bar code at all. In fact, if you print or run a print head test, it will print right over the top of the bar code, showing that the printer is completely unaware of the bar code being there. Maybe someone else has figured it out, but we've only seen error upon error with this functionality, and unless you're going to print the entire roll without removing it, it's just a hassle. Not only that, it takes 2 1/2" inches of paper to do it, when it should be done with a half inch. Epson's paper waste is only rivaled by its ink waste.
Epson Driver Issues: Epson decided to remove a bunch of functionality from the driver, like dry time and paper feed adjustment. Those are very often used functions for adjusting for things like canvas slippage, and for resolving slight banding issues with feed adjustment, but they are gone in the driver. Dry time is also gone, and often we would increase dry time for substrates that don't dry fast, like removable adhesive vinyl. This is a serious short coming, and Epson would be well advised to put that functionality back in the driver. It's also worth noting that you cannot change the feed adjustment on the printer either. That functionality is gone.
We use Colorbyte's Imageprint, and convinced them to use the API to put that functionality back (it was still in their menu but wasn't working), so we do have a solution with our RIP, but unless your RIP continues to offer this functionality, you won't find it in the printer drivers or the LCD menu anywhere.
Paper Meandering We have seen paper skew from time to time, but it was never a huge issue. Now we get the "paper meandering" error ALL the time. We always have to ignore it, because it wants you to unload and reload the paper, but it will continue to meander, as if it has somewhere to go. This error is so common that you need to keep an eye on the printer and make sure it's still printing, otherwise it will sit and do nothing until you tell it to ignore the issue. And sometimes when you ignore the issue, it prints blurry as the paper shifts, and then you have expensive misprints. We get misprints like this often - almost every day at some point.
Ink Waste We have opened and checked cartridges that are "empty" and some of them have used most of the ink, but it's still very common to open an ink cartridge that says it's empty, and find 100ml of ink left in a 700ml cartridge. It's hit and miss, and there has been no improvement there.
Color The color is good. It is richer than the P-9000, and sometimes too rich. We've managed to make some good profiles and we do get rich color, and in my opinion the color is still better than the Canon printers, especially since Canon elected to remove the green ink in their latest line of printers. In fact, I purchased a Canon Pro 1000 to test the color and profile it, and see if we could consider moving to Canon, but I found that the color gamut was lacking compared to the Epson Printers, even the P9000.
Conclusion For the first time in years, Epson has offered a new aqueous printer that has some new and exciting functionality that should have commercial printers excited, but the execution has been so terrible, that you can't help but hate the printer. The amount of errors from the printer, misprints, poorly thought out menus, and missing driver functionality are astounding. Most of this should be solvable in firmware and software, if Epson chose to address the issues, but as it stands, this is the worst implementation of their drivers and printer firmware I've ever seen, and I've had every model since the 9800 over the last 14 years.