A few weeks ago I bought an Epson 4800 and the ImagePrint 6.1 RIP.
I have had Imageprint since version 5 and used it with my Epson 2100.
After days of experimenting with the 4800 and the Phatte Black solution, my conclusion is that ImagePrint does a VERY good job when we are talking about color printing on both matte and glossy/lustre papers. I have tried various papers with matching profiles from the ColorByte profile library and the result is first class prints out of the printer everytime.
I normally make my own printer profiles with the EyeOne Pro, but the ImagePrint profiles are so good that there are no need to try to make a better profile. Very good.
BUT - when it comes to Black & White printing with ImagePrint I am still not satisfied. Matte papers (with matte black) works fine, but I have trouble with bronzing as soon as I switch to Glossy or Lustre papers.
I have never been 100% satisfied with ImagePrint Black&White. It is free of metamerism, yes, but speaking ultimate quality, both on matte and glossy papers, I still prefer the Ultratone inks from MIS (
www.inksupply.com). Their EZN / EZW inks for the Epson C86 or UT7 for Epson 2100 makes black&white in its own class. With these inks and the time to fine tune the process, you will get absolutely outstanding black&white with a depth that I have not seen from ImagePrint yet.
It is not as easy as ImagePrint, but almost, but the result is much better and you will be able to switch from cool to warm tone with adjustments in the epson driver.
ImagePrint can tint Black&White prints also, the result is mostly OK, but it can not beat the tone from UT7.
The end of my experiments was that I switched back to having LightLightBlack in the Epson 4800 again, which improved the quality on lustre/glossy papers and on black&white also.
Now I use the 4800 with photo black and use the 2100/UT7 setup for all my black&white printing.
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