In another thread, Paul Leverington asked about dedicated printers for B&W work.
http://www.naturescapes.net/forums/view ... &p=2303201
I was asking because I want to start up maybe a dedicated black and white printer. But I'm not sure about a few things. My thoughts were that when I retired the 9600 after buying the 9900 I would convert that one to B&W. Sounds like a good idea after all It's sitting here. But then I read where Cone says the most awesome prints yet have been off that 1400 with it's small picoliter drop size (one something) and that makes me wonder will the 9600 at three something picoliters be up to the task.
Lots of variables to play with, and as always there is no one "optimal" answer. Yes, the Epson 1400 has some appeal for this work because its small ink droplet size lets Jon Cone play with his K7 carbon ink formulation and his custom curves in QuadTone RIP, to do some interesting things with ink density and detail. The reason the 1400 has 1.5 picoliter minimum droplet size is that its OEM ink set is based on dyes, not pigments. Dye-based inks often have a smaller particle size.
But the flip side is that putting a carbon pigment ink set through a print head designed for dye has some risk associated with it. All third-party ink solutions bear some risk, but it can be a bit lower when substituting dye-for-dye and pigment-for-pigment. Doing a pigment-for-dye switch is putting a different type of ink material and particle size through the head; though in the case of Cone K7 he's done a lot of work on the ink design and with the company manufacturing the inks, and should know whether it's a stable combination to use on an 1400.
For me, I wouldn't really think of using a 1400 anyway, for other reasons. It's an entry-level model without anything like the kind of operating profile of the larger, heavier-duty models; this includes supports for media size & diversity, and the robustness of the media transport mechanism. A 1400 would be suitable for someone wanting to do only low volumes of small prints on a limited range of media.
And then the 9600 only has 7 slots for cartridges where as later printers have enough slots fo the K7 inks and glossy black and GO so I'm not sure I'll wind up happy with the 9600 after a while especially when considering the cost of charging it with Cone inks.
The x600 series would be fine for a B&W conversion job. The master printer I work with in Calgary uses a variety of x600, x800, x880 and x900 printers. He has several converted for different variations of the Cone K7 ink set (Selenium, Neutral and Carbon), and really there is no pragmatic way to tell the difference in quality between them. This also addresses whether an x600 or above model is up to the job of B&W with these types of ink sets, due to the droplet size. They absolutely are up to it.
One big issue with the x600 series is simply print speed. When I watch a big print roll off the x600 next to one rolling off an x880 or x900, I sometimes wonder if the x600 is actually running or not! The newer models are much faster. Now, whether one cares about the print speed is a personal choice. Obviously it's an issue for a commercial print shop where time is money, measured by the number of print jobs that can be pushed through a piece of hardware. For myself I'm less concerned about blazing speed but I certainly don't want to waste my time either. If I was going to convert a model over for B&W I probably wouldn't pick an x600, due to the performance and the fact that it's an older platform with presumably less useful life in it. But if I already had one and didn't have much else to do with it, it would probably be a suitable choice to start out with. So from a quality viewpoint, Cone K7 prints from an x600 look fabulous.
Paul, you do raise a more important issue about the number of ink slots. Cone in particular does now have a variation of his K7 that takes 9 slots -- 7 shades of carbon including the original MK black for matte papers, a separate PK black for glossy papers, and the GO to do a gloss overprint. In an x600 with only 7 ink slots, you can't run this ink set. You'd need a new platform with more ink slots. He does produce a variation of this matte/glossy ink set for 8-slot printers. It uses 6 shades of black including MK, a separate PK, and the GO.
Of course the newer 9-slot printers will take all 9 inks straight up. This is why I went with a new 3880 for my K7 desktop machine rather than trying to convert over my older 8-ink 4880.
However be aware that there's a potential show-stopper running the full K7 matte/glossy combo in any x900 series. It took the Cone folks and others quite awhile to diagnose this issue, but apparently the x900 printers come with a hardware kill switch built into the printer. The purpose of it seems to be to detect when a media feed problem has happened, e.g. paper being physically too short for the size of print sent to the printer. There's a sensor hardwired to detect what it thinks is end of media, and it kills the current print job immediately. It's a hardwired feature, not configurable, so it can't be turned off under any software control. Sounds like a reasonable safety precaution, but it's a case of the printer being too smart for its own good for somebody who is trying an alternative process.
The way the Cone gloss optimizer works (and I believe any other 3rd-party systems with GO would be the same) is you have to feed the print through the printer a second time to lay down GO over the whole print surface. The Epson print process can't be hijacked enough to lay down GO at the same time as laying down the main inks. When you try to feed a Cone K7 glossy print through an x900 for the 2nd time to put on the GO, the kill sensor in the printer will detect some black ink somewhere, think that the paper has run out, and kill the print job. This trashes an expensive big piece of paper with ink and only partial GO coverage. So from my research into this, an Epson x900 is not a suitable K7 matte/glossy combo printer. Read about this situation on the InkjetMall support forums. For some reason I can't log into the forum right now so I can't locate the related threads. Here is a shorter one on the 4900:
http://www.inkjetmall.com/tech/showthre ... Epson-4900
The way folks have worked around this is to use a non-x900 printer. And/or, for larger volume shops like Cone's own print studio, they maintain a dedicated printer chassis like an old 7600 or something that strictly does GO overprints for all their other printers.
This is the other reason I selected the 3880 rather than upgrading to say a 4900 for K7 matte/glossy printing. The 3880 doesn't have this media overprint kill switch, but it appears the 4900 does. The 4900 also has other potential issues; there are some troubling reports about the head design in the x900 series and I personally made the decision to stay clear of that series. I know many people, presumably including yourself, are happy with the x900's but there are some major horror stories with them... worse IMO than what has been seen before with Epson.
And that leads me to my next mind confusing problem. The paul roak inkset over at ink supply is a whole lot cheaper, is carbon, and has 6 or 7 tones--I think. So far I have not been able to find on the web anyone who has done a comparison study of the two of them side by side. I wouldn't think there could be mountains of difference, but I'm sure there is some. Allegedly the Roark inks are less warm and more neutral than the Cone's. But Cone seems to have worked out some nice choices with his different inksets. Cone also says when you see a glossy paper type printed and gone over with the gloss optimser you won't believe your eyes. Makes me wonder about going that way.
I did not look at the other B&W ink sets out there when I made my decision. Cone is a true pioneer in this area and I researched for a long time to conclude that if I was going to trust any 3rd-party ink system, it would be one from him. Doesn't mean others may not be equally good or trustworthy of course. Paul Roark has been doing some heavy work in this area as well, his name shows up a lot.
But I don't know anything about his own package. It didn't hurt at all that the master printer I use here in town has several K7 converted printers and I was able to see the results first hand with my own prints. I've never directly encountered prints or photographers using the other B&W systems. Cost was not my primary motivating factor, it was the quality & trustworthiness of the approach.