Migrating from the Epson 2200 to the 4000

Fig. 1. Epson 4000

After using an Epson 2200 for more than two years and a 1270 before that, I've recently upgraded to the Stylus Pro 4000. Many photographers have already done this and many more contemplate this move. With this report I'm going to try to provide as much information as possible about what it's like to make this change.

The decision to move up was far from an easy one to make. The 2200 was already producing outstanding prints for me; its downsides were its 13" max width, its leisurely print speed, the frequent need to change cartridges, and the environmental unfriendliness of those tiny cartridges and packaging. I didn't find the first three limitations to be that serious, so my intention had been to wait a year or so to see what Epson's next generation of printers would bring to the table. However, when a friend who had to move into smaller digs offered a trade, the thought of cranking out my own A2 prints proved to be just too much temptation to resist.

Transporting printers by car

The printer swap meant that I had to pack my 2200 in its original carton. The manual said to remove all the cartridges; but I also know that if you leave a cartridge out of its slot for any length of time the remaining ink will dry in the nozzles of that colour creating a probably fatal clog. I could only assume that removing all seven cartridges allowed some sealing mechanism to kick in, but I found the prospect of trusting this to be rather traumatic. My friend said when she sold her 2200 she left the cartridges in, drove it to its new home, set it up, and got it working with no problem, so we decided to take that approach.

The manual for the 4000 says it is not necessary to remove the cartridges for a short-distance move; one only needs to lock them and the print head in place. In short, both printers made the ten mile trip to their new homes without incident with cartridges in place.

Meet the beast

Of course, the single most striking aspect of the 4000 is its sheer size. This is not a microwave, or even a kitchen sink - it's a bathtub! I swear it's bigger than the 7600; maybe not quite as long but deeper from front to back. The 4000 does not have the all-metal housing of the larger Epson pro printers, so it looks more like an overgrown 2200. The dual blacks and dual paper feeds (roll and front tray) are the cat's meow.

It is almost frighteningly fast, about 3x the throughput I was getting from my 2200, and that with my rickety old 500 MHz Pentium II driving it.

In short, and in spite of the plastic housing, this is very definitely a heavy-duty device intended for production environments.

Resolution

The 4000's driver interface forces you to use 1440 dpi for matte paper, instead of the 2800 I used to use on the 2200. This is without question one of several of the 4000's just plain wrong design decisions. The theory may be that matte paper does not hold a fine enough line to warrant 2880 ppi, but my own prints prove otherwise. However, the 4000's driver interface offers two options (under Advanced) that serve to correct this. One is Microweave, Super(x); the other is Finest Detail. With both of these on the print time is a few minutes more, but the result is as though 2880 ppi were available. For prints on photo (RC) paper the 2880 option is available. The 4000's 3.5 picolitre drop size does not make a visible difference over the 2200's 4 picolitre drop size.

Colour handling

Other reviewers have stated that the profiles supplied with the 4000 for Epson media are very accurate; I fully concur*. But this one fact only begins to tell the story. For artistic reasons my strong preference is to use matte paper rather than photo paper. With the 2200 I had to use photo paper instead of matte both for images with large dark areas and for images with vivid/saturated warm colours, such as fall colour scenes. With the 4000 the second restriction goes away. I am now more gamut from my 4000 matte prints than I was from photo paper prints on the 2200, especially in the shadows.

This result points to the driver's dither algorithms having been totally re-written for the 4000 - a breakthrough that previous Epson printer owners have pleaded for for many years.

Fig. 2. Gamut comparison (as best as can be done in a browser)

The flip side of the coin is that the matte paper black and shadow areas print very differently than they do on the 2200. TO my eyes the 2200's driver deliberately adds more matte black than is called for to compensate for the flatness of pigment black ink**. This gives a print more foundation but has an extremely adverse effect on the accuracy and richness of shadow colours.

As wonderful as this is, all my carefully edited image files now need to be carefully re-edited. I am finding:

Areas that I thought were true black from my 2200 prints are often actually up around 10,10,10 and so need to be clipped.

Fig. 3. Shadow area printed on the 2200 vs. the 4000

All my shadow areas print too light, as if flash fill were turned on, and need to be darkened and increased in contrast.

Fig. 4. Shadow area printed on the 2200 vs. the 4000

Areas of reds, oranges, and yellows often print too garishly and need to be toned down.

Paper handling

With no less than 4 paper feed options the 4000 sounds like a tinkerer's dream. The 4000 comes with a printed manual, a printed quick reference, an on-line reference manual, and a set of Flash mini movies to demonstrate various aspects of its use. None of these suffices to help me deal with day-to-day paper handling issues. The 4000 has a laser light photoelectric sensor in the print head that makes several passes as you load a sheet of paper. Two passes determine whether the paper is loaded correctly from left to right, a third checks the width of the paper for comparison with what the driver is requesting.

Nevertheless, my very first print of 17" roll was noticeably skewed, with the left side being perhaps a 1/4" higher than the right. Feeding the paper from the roll into the printer is awkward at first unless you can stand behind the printer, which I can't and I doubt if many people will have room to permit. If I instead use the paper tray and switch from letter-sized stock to Super A3, the printer refuses to print, claiming the paper is the wrong size, even though it's not. The solution to this is to reset the printer by holding down the waste basket icon for 3 seconds.

Also, because of the paper path, one has to load paper in the paper tray upside down, which has caused me so far to print four times on the wrong side of the sheet (I don't know whether anyone else would have this problem.) I don't catch this problem until the job is fully printed thanks to another of Epson's Wrong Design Decisions: the transparent plastic cover over the print head area is tinted. Since you are unable to open the cover during the print job, you now have to wait until the job completes to discover such mistakes.

Finally, there's the manual feed slot, which has to be used for all paper 0.5mm or more in thickness. No real problem for A3 and larger sheets, but trying to load letter-size sheets is an exercise in frustration, since the paper isn't long enough to reach to the paper guidelines.

Note: If you plan to use roll paper in your 4000 be aware that the high tension spindle is an extra; it ships with the low tension spindle. This in spite of the fact that Epson specifies the high tension spindle for the majority of its roll papers (see here). Preliminary reports are that few people are having problems using the low tension spindle.

Update: I seem to be getting the hang of using this infernal machine with time. It is also possible to turn off the paper size and paper position sensing, if you want to take the implied risk of skewed prints, etc. But even as paper loading becomes easier with pratice, another irritation becomes less tolerable with the passage of time: on a Windows box each time you make a change to the paper source in the driver - for example, from paper tray to roll - the driver reverts to the new source's defaults. Settings like auto cut on/off and paper area centered are buried deep within the driver and can cost you quite a few dollars in wasted paper and ink, but nevertheless they are not retained if you switch paper sources.

The driver version that shipped with my machine was 6.41. The latest driver version on Epson Support is 6.44. Be aware that 6.44 (Windows) does not solve this problem, but instead makes you life even more miserable by eliminating the maximum paper size option for matte paper types.

A further problem that persists in the latest version of the driver is that the printer will reject a print job if you follow a letter-size print from the paper tray with a larger print from the paper tray. The work-around is to do a reset (wastebasket button on the printer) between jobs.

There is one issue that no amount of time is likely to resolve: the 4000 puts a crease line across your expensive roll paper several inches from the leading edge if you leave the paper loaded for more than a few minutes without printing. Unless you are printing consecutive jobs you have to back the paper out of the print path then re-feed it into the print path for each run. This results in your getting more practice at the awkward task of loading roll paper than you ever dreamt of in your fondest pre-4000 nightmares.

Centering: Many 4000 users have discovered that prints do not come out centered on the paper. This problem used to be confined to OSX, but Epson have generously extended it to the rest of us. See here for the work-around. This also seems to have been corrected in the latest version of the drivers.

Paper selection

Epson provides a very decent line-up of papers for its printers. I'm not aware of any other printer manufacturer that has this big a line-up of papers, let alone papers with archival ratings. One weakness of the line-up is the lack of large cut sheet choices. If you want a 17x22" or an A2 sheet of matte paper, you'll have to look elsewhere. The significant advantage of roll stock is that you can set the length as needed for the aspect ratio of each print. I have never seen the end of the roll of 15 mil art paper, but I'm sure it is considerable.

De-curling: One solution to roll paper curl is to purchase the pricey but apparently well-designed D-Roller. Another, from engineer Greg Endler is to buy the least expensive roll of canvas you can find, open it out a way, insert the curled print with the curl in the opposite direction from that of the canvas, re-roll the canvas with print sandwiched inside, and wait several hours. Even less expensive: go to your local fabric store and pick up about 10 feet of canvas wider than your widest print size. Roll that around an empty paper spool and proceed as above. Works a charm.

Kindly, Epson provides fairly extensive support for third-party papers in the driver. You can create custom paper configurations that specify sheet dimensions, platen gap, (global) ink density, drying times, etc. You will of course need to make or acquire custom profiles for non-Epson papers and choose one of the Epson paper types in the driver as the basis for the profile.

Ink handling

The 2200 and other desktop printers keep their ink in small cartridges sitting on top of the moving print head. Larger printers like the 4000 have an immobile ink supply that feeds to the print head via plastic tubing. As you've undoubtedly already read, when you first set up a 4000 several minutes and a large fraction of the supplied ink is dedicated to filling those long runs of tubing. The 4000 accepts (and Epson supports the use of) both the 110 ml and 220 ml UltraChrome cartridges that were originally designed for the 7600 and 9600 printers. Prices vary with the retailer but for me this means I pay approx. $1 per ml for ink in a 2200 cartridge and $0.50 for ink in a 220ml cartridge. (The downside of this is that you have to shell out several hundred dollars up front each time you stock up on a few cartridges. You're actually paying less for ink over the course of a year; it just seems like a bigger hit to your bank balance when you do pay.)

Fig. 5. 220ml, 110ml, 2200 cartridge

Equally important: cartridge changing occurs far less frequently. Of course this means having to fuss with Epson's unbelievably user- and environmentally- unfriendly packaging less often. It also means that dealing less often with the all too frequent issue of one colour running out when another colour is nearly out, so that the recharging from changing one colour means the second cartridge will be emptied and need changing.

One perk that comes with the Epson pro printers over the consumer models is the status report. A menu option on the printer's LCD panel allows you to print out a letter-sized sheet detailing how many mls of ink you've used, how many print jobs you've run, roughly how much ink remains in each cartridge, and the amount of wear on each of several mechanical components. Simply date and file these reports to track ink consumption, etc.

Worth it?

My intent is to offer you enough information to make your own call on this. It's always nice when a company doesn't bother to inform you that you are paying them for the privilege of being a beta tester for their product. For me, the greater gamut and superior shadow handling of the 4000 together with the joy of making my own A2s after years of being confined to +A3s is very nearly worth the punishment my bank account is taking to support this larger monkey on my back.

*But first you have to find them. It may come as a shock to Epson, but not everyone on the planet has upgraded from Win98SE. The Win98SE installer does install the supplied profiles; you have to finagle them from the WinXP directory on the CD.

**Note that you cannot turn the 4000 into a 2200 by simply increasing the ink density setting in the driver. Doing so increases the application of all ink colours, not just black.