faith restored in epson.

[inaneredstripe]

brand spanking new epson 3800 A2printer arrived on our doorstep a couple of weeks ago.sat quietly in its box for 12 days while mrs went into hospital and i rearranged the office. finaly got it plumbed in and fired it up. CRUNCH SCRAPE SCREECH . oh b******s.
rang supplier (warehouse express) who contacted epson.
" sorry ,you,ve had it more than 14 days, we cant replace , we,ll have to repair". again, oh b*****s.
NEXT DAY repair man appears, takes a look and says
" yup, damaged in transit , its been dropped. we,ll have a new one out to you within a week." . stunned , or what. rang us today to say it,ll be with us tomoro, courier will take old one away on delivery. wow.

 

[LeeP]

Epson support are superb.

I had an inkhead go on my printer last week - £440 bill for it. However, the guy was knowlegable, friendly, not disgruntled for getting out of bed very early in the morning for the call out. Also gave me some free ink too

 

[cowasaki]

I am on my 7th Epson, a R2400. Printed one page and fantastic. Installed Leopard.... Printer switched to draft mode and wouldn't print in anything but that even if the settings were set to photo! Epson's site said new drivers in November! Eventually released yesterday. New drivers print in photo alright but the colour matching is terrible! It is ok if it is set to matte paper though! Epson's support has been terrible though they were not at all helpful. I have wasted 1/2 of my ink and all the free paper they supplied with the printer! I will however be much happier when I get a CISS and a big supply of paper after Christmas.

The R2400 though is an absolute peach of a printer!!

 

[LeeP]

Have you disabled / got installed GIMP print? The Mac's are pretty dreadful at running printers if i'm honest.

I do all of my correction / matching on Mac, but then have a Windows XP machine running the RIP for the printer.

 

[cowasaki]

Have you disabled / got installed GIMP print? The Mac's are pretty dreadful at running printers if i'm honest.

I do all of my correction / matching on Mac, but then have a Windows XP machine running the RIP for the printer.

I have been using Windows based machines since 3.11/95 era and Acorn Risc before that. Only switched to Macs after seeing them at my daughters art department. Since then I have bought 4 mac laptops, a mac mini and a high spec Mac pro! I have found that the drivers under Windows do seem a bit more sophisticated!

The first print from the R2400 was breath taking! But since installing Leopard and then waiting a month for the driver update I have been less than impressed! Should be ok when I get my CISS and colour corrected setup sorted!

Printing on the Windows based machine is just a pain though and how do I print my photoshop stuff without a windows photoshop program? Unless of course I save it as another format.

 

[LeeP]

Photoshop is useful for printing I agree - however with a decent print handling package (QImage for example) you can print various formats very easily and is very cheap.


It controls the layout and printing, though it doesnt handle the inkset...

The interpolation program is terrific.

How big are you printing on a regular basis?

You printing direct from photoshop?

 

[cowasaki]

Photoshop is useful for printing I agree - however with a decent print handling package (QImage for example) you can print various formats very easily and is very cheap.


It controls the layout and printing, though it doesnt handle the inkset...

The interpolation program is terrific.

How big are you printing on a regular basis?

You printing direct from photoshop?

I have been printing directly from Photoshop and Aperture. I have an R300 with CISS and a colour laser (refillable cartridges) for normal printing, the R2400 is just for photographs. I picked it because I wanted something good for black and white too. I want to be able to print maybe a dozen photos or more a week at A3 and A4. Plus my daughter is doing 3 arty A levels!


I have never heard of Qimage. Is there a better method than printing than from Photoshop?

 

[LeeP]

QImage is a RIP (raster image processing).

This software takes your image and text and tells the printer where and how to place each squirt of ink on the paper.

It takes the digital information about fonts and graphics that describes the appearance of your file and translates it into an image composed of individual dots that the printer can output.

It's another (and easier) way to manage printing. For me it's priceless. I can throw into it say 50 images all of various sizes that I want to print onto a 44" roll of paper. It organises them (using first-fit algorithm) in the most cost effective way. I can decide how wide apart the images are, if I want crop line, filename under each pic etc

Very very useful in my workflow.

You could look at it as another way to drive your printer, without faffing around with the terrible drivers on the Mac...