And, not a question for you, but in principle for Epson, why should Epson produce a new model professional printer that has less gamut than a model now four years old or more? I don't get it. If Epson needs to know, what I'm looking for is incremental progress where it matters, not regress. So I would like to see preserved the gamut of the 4900...
Well, I won't be able to answer this question definitively until we can run some independent confirming tests on the new HD ink set where we can actually publish the fading curves, but assuming the lofty Wilhelm ratings reported in the WPPI article are indicative of a greatly improved yellow pigment lightfastness, it's very likely that Epson chemists had to switch to a different yellow pigment to accomplish that feat. It probably wasn't enough just to tinker with resin encapsulation properties alone. It's a well known and longstanding fact that more stable pigments and dyes tend to be less colorful, so there is nearly always an engineering trade-off between light fastness and color gamut. In fact if the more colorful dyes had more light fastness, I doubt any manufacturer would be producing pigment printers for the home and fine art photography market. Those pigment printers would be allocated only to applications in outdoor signage.
Moving to a more stable but somewhat less vivid and/or slightly hue-shifted yellow thus means somewhat compromised reds. greens, and blues reproduction (they need yellow in the blend to make those colors). This is what the slightly reduced gamut of the HD versus K3VM ink sets is hinting at. Recall the first Epson desktop pigmented ink printer (the Photo Stylus 2000). It had a very stable yellow pigment, much more so than Ultrachrome K3 yellow, but combined with a "dirtier" magenta in that ink set and no photo grays, and we had a printer with horrible color constancy problems and pretty compromised color gamut. I personally bought one and made only a few prints before abandoning it as totally unsatisfactory. I could make a perfectly gray balanced print under 5000K high CRI lighting, walk the print into a gallery under 3200K lamps where the color balance would look implausibly reddish, then carry the print over to a window with overcast cool daylight illumination and the print would turn a sickly cyan-green in color balance. Obviously Epson engineers got the message from customer feedback, and improvements were then made, but the next generation of inks erred too far towards a vivid yellow pigment selected for color constancy and colorfulness. That opened the door for Canon and HP to deliver pigmented ink sets that struck a different balance (better or worse depending on who you ask) between color gamut and longevity, also ushering in era of 12 color sets that add red, orange,violet, and/or green inks in various ways to extend what the cyan, magenta, and yellow inks can do for blue, green, and red reproduction.
IHMO, Epson probably should have introduced a different yellow when the X900 series HDR ink set was introduced, but the public at the time was largely unaware of the K3 yellow pigment stabilty weaknesses, so "if it ain't broke" in the minds of the consumer, there's little incentive to change. Now that it's more common knowledge that the older Epson K3VM and HDR ink sets lag significantly behind recent Canon and HP pigment sets in lightfastness, there was indeed more incentive for Epson to make further improvements, and it seems promising that Epson may have achieved it. It's just the way the world works
I do anticipate that the HDR set with it's extended color gamut using orange and green inks will get an update as well and we will see that new generation of HDR type printers soon, perhaps next year. I think at that point, Epson may once again be leading rather than following, and Canon may then have to respond. I doubt anyone will top the current HP Vivera pigment stability, but if the other companies meet or come close, that would be great.
Meanwhile, the color gamut of the P600 HD ink set should be more than adequate for it's intended market. Improved black levels are indeed part of the total color gamut though few people think of greater tonal range that way, and it is actually more critical to the vast majority of images how accurately and pleasingly the low to moderate chroma colors are being reproduced. For example, get the skin tones of the bride and the neutral tonal gradients in the wedding dress right, and the fact that the red roses she's holding are vivid red but not as super vivid red as in the digital image on the monitor, and the print will still be perceived by the viewer as a beautiful print
Now, if the print just stays that way over time, all the better
cheers,
Mark
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com
