epson printers on amd64

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

On 11/20/2011 12:14 AM, David Southwell wrote:
> On Sunday 20 November 2011 01:55:18 perryh at pluto.rain.com wrote:
>> Warren Block<wblock at wonkity.com>  wrote:
>>> On Sat, 19 Nov 2011, David Southwell wrote:
>>>> Anyone up to date on how to do high quality printing with
>>>> epson inkjet printers (in my case r2400 and r2880) on amd64
>>>> systems.  print/pips* reports they require 386 and do not
>>>> compile on amd64.
>>>
>>> print/gimp-gutenprint works pretty well from Gimp, although
>>> I have not figured out how to get consistent color and brightness.
>>> It supports both of those printers.
>>
>> I'm sure I'm not alone in doubting that _any_ ink-spitter is likely to
>> produce "high quality printing" or "consistent color and brightness",
>> regardless of the host support used.  Those printers are designed to
>> be manufactured as inexpensively as possible so as to be sold at very
>> low prices, the profit being in the recurring ink sales.  "Cheap" and
>> "high quality" tend to be incompatible design goals.
>

Every printer out there is designed to be used in a business model where
the profits are in recurring consumables sales.

>
> Not so with epson 2400 and 2880 when properly profiled these professional
> printers produce salon quality prints and are not in any way comparable with
> inexpensive consumer "inkspitter" models - I think you are right as far as
> more economically priced printers are concerned. I have many prints produced
> on epson 2400, 2880&  larger epson printers accepted into international salons
> and received awards.

I have a cheaper Epson inkjet myself that uses the same ink setup as the 
more expensive ones your referring to and produces similar quality 
photos.  The main difference between it and the more expensive inkjets 
is the paper control, in the better printers the paper is much more 
securely held and less likely to slip during printing.

However, despite the fact that inkjets can be manufactured to produce
excellent output, the caveat is that it is all in the ink.  You cannot 
get high quality output from an inkjet with standard water-soluble
inks, that's why the epson output is so good, because they use
petroleum-based inks.  However, the oil based inks WILL clog the 
printhead unless the printer is used frequently.  The industry 
experimented with wax-based inks for a while, those also produce
excellent output, but the printers also will clog unless they are
used every day.  I myself buy aftermarket water-soluble ink cartridges
that are a drop-in replacement for the Epson cartridges, and do
not clog, and are much cheaper.  Print quality is lower, though.

These printers are totally unsuitable for the average consumer who just
wants to print a picture once every few months.  Furthermore the 
cost-per-page is far higher than the current crop of inexpensive
color laserjet printers, that is due to Epson using very small ink
cartridges.  Epson does that because larger cartridges have more mass
and more mass has more inertia and is harder to control.

Getting back to the original question, if your going to drop $500 into
a professional quality inkjet and at least that every year into
consumables for it in order to print pro-quality pictures on a regular
basis, then setup an older extra 32-bit Intel-based PC as a print server 
and send Postscript jobs to it over the network, and have it
convert them to whatever language the printer uses.

Ted