12.28.09
Product Review - Epson Photo R1900
The perfect is the enemy of the good. - Volaire
Read any official review of the Epson photo printer R1900 and you will find nothing but raves. It prints dots smaller and more accurately than any other. And it produces skin tones like no other. Furthermore, because it is capable of handling rolls of paper, you can print huge pictures at eye-popping resolutions. The only thing better is being there.
As a user of HP all-in one printers for five or seven years, I decided to upgrade about a year ago. I considered competitive printers by Canon and HP and settled on the R1900 because there was general agreement that its photo quality was as close to perfect as is generally available anywhere at any cost.
One or more review articles pointed out that because Epson uses smaller ink nozzles to deliver tinier ink droplets - a feature that allows finer color gradations - the print nozzles would clog. I was willing to set up special photo-printing sessions once or twice per year to accommodate this problem. I knew that this alone would cost about three or four ink cartridges worth of ink - meaning that the first print would always cost $40.
What I did not know, however, was how truly tiny the ink cartridges were. Not until I decided to print this year’s Christmas letter on th Epson Photo R1900. It took about an hour to unclog the print heads. And it took about $40 worth of ink. But fortunately, they all cleared out and I was able to print. I printed a two-page letter, eighty copies of it. When I was all finished, I had used 12 ink cartridges and 8 gloss optimizers. That’s $159 worth of ink and an additional $27 worth of gloss optimizer. The cost of supplies for the job was $186, or just shy of $1.20 per page.
Bear in mind that these letters are mostly white space. There were two tiny photos and a little spot color. To make matters worse, the gloss optimizer smudged the ink and curled the paper making the whole job look really shoddy. To produce a single print took maybe a minute. Maybe two. It took two maybe three hours to produce the 160 pages of letters. And about a week to beging flattening the curled pages.
Curiously, when each ink cartidge became empty, the printer utility stopped working correctly. Sometimes the utility would not work at all. At other times it would simply show a missing cartridge and fail to identify any of the cartidges by name. This would force the impatient to replace ALL cartridges each time one was empty, multiplying the cost of ink eight-fold! Or one could replace the cartridges one at a time until things worked again, starting with the one that the printer utility said was missing. This usually did the trick. Still, the idea that the print-utility - whose main purpose is to tell you which cartridge to replace - stops working at precisely the point in time it is needed makes using the printer a Kafkaesque experience.
There is no point arguing whether the R1900 can be a good printer for some purposes. If one needs the ultimate in photo reproduction at any cost on very expensive archival paper, this may be a good printer. For printing very subtle skin tone gradations there may be nothing better. But if one is doing anything less demanding this printer is a monumental waste of money. It pays to just go out and buy another printer for each other kind of job. I already bought a laser-jet printer for my occasional black and white jobs. Now I am preparing to buy another ink-jet printer for photo proofing.
In short, the Epson Photo R1900 is in a category by itself. Other photo printers may be described as photo-capable printers, meaning that they do reasonably well in other tasks; but they are especially well suited to printing photos. The R1900 single-handedly defines the large photo ONLY category. One only uses it to make large prints of photos. To use it for any other purpose is simply a waste time of money.