Epson Print Academy how informative?

[lightstand]

I know there has only been Atlanta but I'm wondering about going this weekend in DC? I have been to one many years ago & it was ok. It's $150 (more important a beautiful Saturday) and I am not after an infomercial on the latest large format printers. Any opinions on how informative Atlanta's was, outside of buying a 7900?

Thanks Jeff

[KeithR]

I attended the last time it came around Minneapolis, I think it was mid '06. I didn't get any impression that it was any kind of infomercial for Epson. The whole time was spent on the facets of inkjet printmaking. The fact that they used an Epson printer(1) was a given. I don't recall Jeff, Bruce, JP or anyone else trying to push an Epson product. Someone asked Jeff about 3rd party inks and he basically said he wouldn't recommend it. Other than that, it was just info about color management that Bruce discussed, JP touched on creativity, etc, and Jeff talked about sharpening, getting files ready for output, etc. There was, of course, discussion about printing from Photoshop and working with ACR. The Lightroom engineers where there taking notes and Jeff got them to implement something into LR. And from what I have read here on LL, there will be a video interview that Michael conducted with Henry Wilhelm, although it will be shortened somewhat. I did enjoy the presentation and learned quite a bit given my lack of experience at the time.

[David Good]

I attended a couple of years ago in Montreal and came away from it with much more information and tips than I had hoped for, not exactly new at this either. Some of the techniques demonstrated were new at the time, and Jeff usually arrives with enough creative ideas to "make your head hurt". I suppose it also depends who is on the tour for your city as to what will be discussed. As Keith points out, they do use Epsons but it did not feel like there was any product push at all. The speakers were very accessible to speak with during the breaks, as long as they weren't too crowded. I'm already booked for Toronto.....

Dave

[gowin]

I attended the Epson Print Academy in Atlanta last Saturday and it was not an infomercial. I attended Track 2 and found it to exceed my expectations. Frankly, I wasn't too sure what to expect from a whole day of lectures and demonstrations, but I have to say it was very informative. We were fortunate in Atlanta because five highly respected industry experts were there - Jeff Schewe, Andrew Rodney, R Mac Holbert, Greg Gorman, and John Paul Caponigro. They were great and each demonstrated certain aspects of their particular workflow or color management. Watching these guys demonstrate their workflows, approach to processing images, etc. is worth way more than the price of admission. Also, there are several times through the course of the workflow demonstrations in which print are made on the 7900 with time to review the prints on breaks.

I recommend you attend the Epson Print Academy. I am sure there will be more good weather days in DC, but the Print Academy only comes around once in a long while.

Mark

[alan a]

I know there has only been Atlanta but I'm wondering about going this weekend in DC? I have been to one many years ago & it was ok. It's $150 (more important a beautiful Saturday) and I am not after an infomercial on the latest large format printers. Any opinions on how informative Atlanta's was, outside of buying a 7900?

Thanks Jeff

Just to clarify, it is this SUNDAY in Washington, DC -- not Saturday.  On Saturday there is a Software Cinema event on photoshop.  I plan on attending both.  

My biggest complaint about NAPP and their seminars is that they are only on weekdays.  I refuse to take a vacation day to attend a seminar to lean about  photography.  I save my vacation days for actually doing photography, not to attend a seminar.  

This weekend is the first time, in several years, that seminars have come to DC on a weekend.   And two of them on the same weekend, no less.  So I will attend both.  (I actually wrote a note to NAPP and asked if they could rotate the schedules and put some of the seminars on a weekend, and they sent a response that basically told me to go screw myself.  They also offered the interesting rationale that professionals must shoot weddings and sports on weekends, and they do not schedule their events for amateurs.  Or, they made it quite clear, even care if amateurs attend their events.  So I must give both Epson and Software Cinema credit and kudos for having their events on a weekend or evenings in some cities.)

I agree with the overall assessment of the Epson Print Academy based on attending the last one.  It is a bit of an infomercial pushing the latest and greatest Epson printer, but I have no objections to that, because I am interested in seeing the 7900 in action.  After all, I started an entire thread on that topic.

In addition to the infomercial for Epson, the other responses are correct that there is a great deal of very useful information that is presented.  It is well worth attending.

I hope that Schewe will print his Antarctica photo on luster, as he indicated that he will in the other thread, so we can see the presence or lack thereof of GD.  I also hope to ask them to load a sheet of paper during one of the breaks, to see how it does on sheet loading, as compared with the HP Z3100, which does a terrible job in that regard.

[gowin]

Alan, they printed almost exclusively with cut sheet paper on the 7900 at the Atlanta Epson Print Academy. From what I recall, they mainly used 24"x 30" Espon Exhibition Fiber Paper. I recall doing the math on the paper when I got home that night - that stuff is expensive. Awesome paper though.

Mark

[JimGoshorn]

Wish Epson would have developed a paper that would be available in rolls and not only in sheets. And yes, it is the most expensive of the fine art "darkroom-like" papers out there.

Jim

[billg71]

I attended last Saturday's session and found it to be anything but an "infomercial". While they did play a couple of video interviews with (I believe) Dan Steinhardt of Epson about the technical details of the new printers, for the most part it was pretty much strictly about photography and workflow. Concentrating(naturally) on color management and printing.

One caveat: Maybe it was because it was the inaugural session and all five instructors were there, it seemed like everyone was pressed for time, running through their presentations at a pretty frantic clip. There wasn't a lot of time for Q&A with the audience, and that's what I felt like: an audience, someone sitting in a chair watching a stage performance. I consider myself fairly knowledgeable when it comes to digital printing, I've read Andrew's book, watched Jeff on the LL videos, and studied Caponigro's techniques from his DVD's, PDF's and interviews and I've learned a lot from those sources. But what I got at the seminar was a quick re-hash of all of that with no real "value-added" content. If they'd held this a year ago I would have been thoroughly enthralled, but it wasn't a year ago and I've learned a lot in the meantime so, content-wise, I'd have to say I didn't get a lot out of the day.

OTOH, it was nice to finally see some of the real masters of our art live and in person, the print gallery was astounding and there were some discounts available for attendees. I got a free camera strap from Microsoft and ordered some Solux bulbs at a discount with free shipping. My local dealer was there so I had a chance to chat with a couple of the salespeople I know and Epson was picking up sales tax on any of their products bought at the seminar.

All in all, I'd have to say I got my moneys' worth. If you're at the top of your game when it comes to CM/workflow/printing, you may not learn as much as you'd like but it's well worth the $150 for the experience. IMHO...

Bill

P.S. Dano, if you're listening, a couple of words: TABLES and NAME BADGES. It's nice to have some place to set your notebook and especially nice to know who you're talking to.....

[alan a]

Posted deleted by Alan with apologies to Jeff Schewe.  See explanation below.

[Schewe]

I suppose Schewe will respond with yet another posting that he just can't be bothered and it wasn't convenient to load luster on the printer.  That's pretty much been his attitude in the other thread.  You'd never know that we are all paying to attend, and have made a very reasonable request.

I've already arranged to have a roll of luster loaded and I WAS planning on running off the prints tonite but with your cranky attitude, I wonder why I bother? And no, we do NOT have time during the actual Print Academy to go off script. As was already noted, we're trying to pack as much as possible into the program to the point where JP and Mac are struggling to get through their content. We've already talked about that "rushed" feeling–heck I got it listening to Mac & JP too. For my program, I was 4 minutes over (still too long) and Andrew was just under 10 minutes over so by the time the afternoon rolled around we were already way behind. We've made adjustments that should work (we hope) so that we don't give off that rushed feeling any more and that each of us has enough time to do Q&A (which is where Alan can ask his questions). You should also note bud that EFP IS a glossy paper that uses photo K inks so it's not like I hid behind matte paper in Atlanta...if you've never seen/used EFP this whole line of crap about Epson or me trying to hide GD is moot.

As for addressing the requests of the paying audience Alan, we'll have about 100 people paying for the program so the the expectations of a single attendee has to be weighed against the wishes of the entire group–what one person my think is a reasonable request (and so far in all the threads I've been involved talking to you "reasonable" is not the word I would use to describe your attitude). If anybody is unhappy about the program after the event is over, you are welcome to request a refund. To date that's only happened once that I know of (seems one guy in Miami hated the food and thought the Track II was TOO advanced but was ashamed to admit it during the day so he could have moved over to Track I).

[lightstand]

Thanks everyone for your responses you have convinced me to give it a go, that plus 46 degrees & windy.  My one hope is that after reading the curriculum there doesn't seem to be anything about trouble shooting our epson printers when things do go bad, I know I have repeatedly had to unclogged my old 2200 with windex and always hope to see how to do this better.

look forward to the talk, jeff

[billg71]

IIRC, there were at least a couple of the gallery photos printed on luster. I don't recall noticing any GD on any of the prints I saw. There certainly isn't any on the JPC print I got from the session, a 24x30 on EFP.

Bill

[alan a]

I attended the Academy.  It was very good and I strongly recommend it.

There were a number of prints done on luster, and I thank Jeff Schewe and  the instructors for doing so.  I have deleted my earlier posting, with an apology to Jeff.

I received four PMs in the last week asking me to post my impression of the 7900.  I did so in the thread that compares the Z3200 versus the 7900.

[Schewe]

Well, I printed out about a 1/2 dozen 18x24 prints on Luster to show the DC attendees as well as my main image on 24x30 on EFP. I have no idea if the effort was worth it to Allen. We got into the venue a full 2 hours late because the event on Sat. ran long. I stayed to 11:30 PM making the Luster prints for Allen to look at but he never identified himself so I don't even know if he attended. Maybe he wasn't planning on coming to DC but was coming to Dallas (I sure thought he said he was gonna be in DC waiting to look at Luster prints to see if he could see any GD on the new 7900 printer).

So, if he did attend, he didn't say anything one way or another...the only issue we had during the printing was than one of Greg Gorman's prints came out with enough of a nozzle clog to have the print suffer from micro-banding. It's kinda tough to have a printer packed up in a crate and unload it the night before (at 11-11:30PM) and expect it to be flawless the next day even of we did do a nozzle check and auto-head alignment before printing on Sun. A quick auto-nozzle check and lite cleaning by Mac Holbert cleared that problem (I think it was an air bubble in the lines that caused it).

We also worked on the timing of the presos-we did a lot better this time (although time is still tight because of the content we're trying to get out).I hope the people that DID attend got something good out of it...thank goodness the guy that won the 4880 was in track II (and he had asked me at the break if he should get rid of his old 4000 printer-he won the 4880!)

[alan a]

Jeff, see my comments in the thread that compares the 7900 to the Z3100.  I think you will be pleasantly surprised -- since I agreed with your earlier assessment, and as I said "ate crow."

There are many stupid debates in this and other forums, with people defending their perspectives to the bitter end, even then the facts show that they are wrong.

I don't want to be guilty of that, and hopefully that is conveyed in my discussion of GD in the report I provided in the other thread.