In the market for a new printer

I'm on a budget of under $1500 (closer to $1000 if possible) but want a solid 17" wide format printer. I am leaning toward the Epson 3880. Are there any rebates or offers I should know about or a recommendation on where to buy an Epson 3880 or 4900 (I don't think I am going to afford the 4900 and not sure what the advantages are). Any other thoughts?

FWIW I'm coming from a debunked 2400 which I have hated since I don't do a lot of printing and the darn thing clogs all the time - now it's permanently clogged and I already paid for a new head once.

P.S. how do you do pano images on a 3880 without the ability to use roll paper? I'm assuming just cut roll paper and enter a custom size but are there limitations?

You can't go wrong with a 3880 and it comes with about $400 worth of ink. If you need roll paper than this isn't the printer for you but for anyone else, this printer rocks! And it doesn't hardly ever clog even here in the very dry desert. There's also a $400 mail-in rebate right now knocking the price down to about $1100. And from personal experience, Epson actually pays without hassles unlike brand C. B&H has the rebate on their listing for the printer:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/control ... &A=details

I have an Epson 3800 and like E.J. says about the 3880, the printer rocks! I've only had 2 clogs in the two years I've owned it. Both after not using the printer for about 3 months and both cleared up quickly by doing a nozzle check and clean. If you are going to print pano's or make a lot of 16"x24" prints, getting the 4900 with the ability to use rolls may just be worth the extra expense.

You can't go wrong with the 3880. I bought one early this spring and its one of the best investments I have made in a while! I have had ZERO problems with clogs even after a 2 month idle period. I am also amazed at the use of ink...as I have printed lots of 8x10's, 8x12's, 12x18's and some 16x24's and my ink levels held up better than what I expected. For the money, I don't see a better alternative for what this printer is for. The color rendition is splendid, I am constantly amazed at the prints it puts out. I use Red River paper and could not be happier.

Jason

Hi Greg, I took advantage of the $700 rebate on a 4900 two months ago and I believe the rebate is still in effect. The price ended up being only $200 more than your $1500 budget. Great printer but its size is a monster. I'm not looking forward to replacing 11 cartridges. Lee

Another vote for the 3880. I've the predecessor, the 3800, been using it for about a year without any problems. Have printed up to 39" long with cut roll paper, not sure how long you can go with the 3880. Jason's comments on ink usage are right on, not to mention the much cheaper price per ml. of ink. Atlex is currently selling the 3880 for $1119 with free shipping.

I bought the 3880 this past spring and it has performed beautifully. I "upgraded" from a 2200. I've had no problems so far.

As for differences between 3880 and 4900, there are two worth considering:

The 3880 will print on 4x6 up to 17x22 as sheet feed. You can hang roll paper on your self-made hanger and do pans.
The 4900 will print on 8x10 up to 17" wide roll. It is my understanding that it will not print small prints.

How important is being able to do small prints and pan prints?

One correction to what Don wrote. The 3880 will print much bigger sheets than 17x22. It's just that Epson doesn't make such paper so they don't include it in the presets. My standard paper is 17x25 and it can print all of that surface. Furthermore you can manually set a paper size up to 17x36 as a cut sheet.

Keep in mind the vitality of the ink. If you do not print a lot, the ink can expire on printers with large ink cartridges. (i.e. my Epson R1900 - 11ml vs. mu Epson R3880 - 80ml.)

I've had the 3880 for a little more than a year. The print head on my creaky 2200 died and I needed a replacement quickly. Both the 38xx and 48xx series printers were steeply discounted and had huge rebates at the time and after hemming and hawing for a few days I decided to go with the 3880. A friend of mine was facing almost exactly the same circumstances and went the 48xx direction. We're both very happy with the moves. I saved hundreds of dollars and a lot of space, at the expense of roll paper capability.

But I can echo pretty much everything that's been said about the 3880 above. The printer has never clogged since I got it up and running, and this despite several stretches of three or four weeks without use. (The 2200 clogged constantly.) I'm still on the original set of ink cartridges, despite several periods of heavy printing over the past year. I'll probably have to replace the Light Black cartridge in the next 2-3 months.) Color rendition with the K3 inkset is excellent. And it's been a revelation to be able to move up to a printer that's designed for neutral black and white printing. (The 2200 was not so designed.)

Thanks all - 3880 ordered and on the way. I hated my 2400 and hope this one serves me well for years to come! For the few panos I do I'll set up a custom paper size and cut my own FWIW after rebate it was $819 - not bad with $400 worth of ink!

I think you will really like it! It's leagues ahead of the 2400 and even further ahead of the 2200. I sure like mine!

fwiw, i print panos on my 3880 buying 17" rolls and cutting them to 37" strips. i put heavy coffee table books on them for a day or so to flatten, and then print. i believe the 37" length is the 3880 custom paper limit according to the manual but some one might be knowledgeable in ways to increase that. an alternate printing software can also break that length barrier.
enjoy the 3880!

I think you would need an RIP to go bigger than 37" as 37 is the max that the Epson driver accepts.

My usual plug for Qimage applies. It's not a RIP in a few key ways. One is that it's much cheaper. Another is that it prints through the vendor's OEM printer driver (which also means it can use standard ICC printer profiles). But Qimage has tons of RIP-like features. For example, it can break the stock driver's length limitations for most printers by automatically splitting a big image into tiles and printing them back-to-back on continuous paper, with zero gap in between the tiles. This effectively opens up the maximum length that's printable for pano's, beyond what the driver would support through apps like Photoshop or Lightroom.

Using this feature is more difficult on a printer lacking roll support, just from the standpoint of ensuring proper paper feed. But it probably could be made to work on the 3880 with care on how a longer cut sheet was fed through.

Of course, Qimage only runs on Windows...

Enjoy your 3880, Greg. It's unique on the market and an economical but extremely good desktop 17" printer. I'd have one myself except the roll media support was too important for me so I opted for the 4880 last time around.

E.J. Peiker wrote:I think you would need an RIP to go bigger than 37" as 37 is the max that the Epson driver accepts.

Greg--the work around to what EJ says here is like what Royce is talking about using Q image and tiling successive sheets with no gap between them. You can also do this with Illustrator. It's easy, and effectively you can print as long of a pano as you want because your just printing one sheet after another after another, just like you would print 20 or whatever documents say for instance. I doubt you'll need this bit of knowledge however, as 37 by 17 is probably enough for any image, but you might run into an image here and there longer, and it's just nice to know your not limited.

Paul

Wanted to drop in and put in another good word for Qimage. In my opinion, its simply one of the best, easiest platforms out there for printing. I could not be happier with it after trying several different methods and products.

Thanks all! I'm strictly a Mac user so I'm disappointed that I won't be able to try Qimage.

Any recommendations for a Mac user for something similar?

My recommendation is fire up Bootcamp, Parallels or VMware Fusion and try Qimage. Joking aside, quite a few Mac folks do exactly that, since there's nothing really like it native on Mac OS. I believe it's the best printing tool short of spending 10X or more on a full blown RIP. It helps squeeze all the goodness out of a top printer. And if you print a lot, the app has a bunch of time saving print workflow functions, on top.

There will never be a native Mac version of Qimage but IMO that's not a reason not to run it... unless one is content with basic printing from PS or LR, or to spend a lot more.

You could check out XPRoof - a RIP for Mac but I don't know much about it.