hughb40;47392 wrote:Just to add my two pennyworth, we got through 2 Epson R1800s over the years and when they were good they were very good but boy were they (in our experience) fussy beast and sooo prone to clogging!
In my view, the Epson R1800 should *never* have been adopted by Sawgrass as a dye-sub printer. They did it because they panicked themselves into thinking that it was the replacement for the 1290S. No one with even half a braincell believed that, and this was proven when the 1400 came along.
The R1800 was specifically designed for pigment inks with the capacity for a very tiny droplet size down to 1.5pl. It's an 8-tank printer but, for dye-sub, you're not using 8 colours to print with. The printer has two blacks - optimised for either matt or glossy paper. You're only ever going to use one black for dye-sub. The other will just disappear into the waste tank during cleaning cycles. The printer has a gloss optimiser to compensate for the gloss differential of pigment inks. You never use that with dye-sub, so you're provided with "cleaning solution" that, just like the extra black, is only there to disappear into the waste tank during cleaning cycles.
The printer has full-Red and full-Blue inks to compensate for the weak colour gamut of pigment inks in the red and blue regions. For 99% of your prints, you'll never need these. Many dye-sub inksets work just fine without a full red or full blue ink, with just the CMYK. Which leaves the other four inks of the R1800, which are CMYK.
For the vast majority of prints, you're only going to be using those four CMYK colours. The GOP/PK/RD/BU inks are largely irrelevant. Using the R1800 as a dye-sublimation printer is the printing equivalent of putting a square peg in a round hole. It's a superb printer when using pigment inks for full-colour photographs with glossy paper for long-term fade resistant purposes, but for dye-sub? No, I don't think so.
Dye-sublimation ink is a thick ink for which there is no especially-designed desktop printer. At some stage it will go wrong. Shoving it in a £400 printer, or that £2K+ one that was recently announced, is something you only do when you're afflicted with "too much disposable money syndrome". (And, boy, do I wish I suffered from that!) :biggrin:
I do have an Epson R1800 here, but I wouldn't put dye-sub ink into it if it was the last printer I had here.
I have nothing but praise for it - it has earned its keep for us! I appreciate there is a cost/benefit analysis that works different ways for different folks according to needs and work profile but its Ricoh for us!
- not all ebayers sell crap ! - but most do !!
