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Home >> Photography >> Digital Photography Epson
Stylus Pro 4800 Printer
Once upon a time, Epson created a new class of printer to fill the gap between the largest consumer desktop size 13x19 inch printers and the large, plotter-sized professional printers that start at 24-inches and go up from there. The first was the 4000, a large and nearly 100 lb printer that could print at 17-inches wide. This provides the ability to produce a classic 16x20 inch print in a printer that could still live on a desktop (if barely).
The 4000 has some great qualities and is still available. It, along with its smaller stable mate the 2200 (no longer available), were the first of the Ultrachrome ink printers that offered archival pigment inks without the metamerism that afflicted the first Epson pigment printer, the 13x19 inch capable 2000. While the quality is great with matte paper, the 4000 and 2200 suffered from bronzing when used with glossy papers. The Ultrachrome K3 inks (K3 for three black inks used) did away with the bronzing issue with glossy papers and you will generally find much praise heaped upon the R2400, 4800, 7800, and massive 9800 printers for their overall quality for B&W and color prints on matte and glossy papers. Almost perfect, but there’s one feature that the older 4000 had over the 4800 that made the 4000 a convenient printer to use and makes the 4800 a potential money pit. However, I would be remiss not to point out that while the 4000’s feature is convenient, the fact that it has issues with glossy paper printing makes the feature I’m going to discuss, somewhat moot. The older 2200 and 4000 printers used seven-inks (Cyan, Light Cyan, Magenta, Light Magenta, Yellow, Black and Light Black), but the printers could accommodate eight ink cartridges at once. Why the extra cartridge space? The reason why the 2200 and 4000 were able to do away with the metamesrism issue is by using different black inks to match the paper type used. A Matte Black for matte papers and Photo Black for glossy papers. The eighth cartridge space allowed for both types of blacks to be installed at the same time and the printer would automatically select the right black ink based on the paper type specified in the printer driver settings. Very slick and very convenient. For whatever reason (maybe the bronzing issue was too big to ignore) Epson seemed to have desired to push out the K3 printers pretty quickly. The 2200 and 4000 were not that old when the R2400 and 4800 came out and unfortunately, this rush likely led to Epson using existing off-the-shelf parts from the 4000 and 2200 in the design of the K3 printers. The issue is that the K3 printers now use a new Light Light Black cartridge, which helps to do away with bronzing on glossy papers. That’s now nine cartridges, but the K3 printers only accommodate eight cartridges, leaving one black as odd cartridge out. So,
if you like to print on matte papers, you use the Matte Black
ink, but if you decide that you need to do some glossy prints
afterwards, you have to swap out the Matte Black for Photo Black.
This might not have been so bad if the printers only flushed out
the one ink line instead of three or more ink lines whenever a
black ink is swapped out.
I don’t have any verifiable figures to give you, but some of the dollar amounts I’ve seen bandied about is about $20 of ink flushed out with an R2400 and upwards of $75 for the 4800 because the lines are so much longer. I’d be interested to hear of more reliable figures if anyone has them. With the R2400, I’ve swapped inks maybe a half-dozen times and even though on an overall basis, it’s not a huge amount of ink being wasted at any one time, add all those swaps together and it’s going to end up being a tidy sum. It’s for this reason that I will never do a black ink swap with my 4800 unless I have a (paid) print job that justifies the wasting of that much ink. It is also the reason that for the time that I still have use of the R2400, it has become a dedicated matte paper printer while the 4800 is dedicated to glossy papers. For those of you that believe Elvis is hanging out with Jimmy Hoffa and some little green men out in Area 51, the black ink swapping issue was done on purpose by Epson to soak us by forcing us to buy more inks than necessary. For the rest of you, I think Epson was being lazy in using existing parts instead of designing a new ink carrier system to accommodate all nine inks available for the K3 printers. It’s because of the potential wastage of ink that prior to purchasing the 4800, I wondered if I should wait a little longer for that new printer on the block, the Canon iPF5000. Even for this longtime Epson user, the Canon iPF5000 looks pretty awesome on specs alone. It matches the print size capability of the 4800 and adds three more color inks to the mix for a potentially larger gamut of color fidelity. The iPF5000 uses Canon’s new Lucia ink set and there are 12 cartridges of red, blue, green, cyan, photo cyan, magenta, photo magenta, yellow, matte black, photo black, gray, and photo gray. All the carts are installed at the same time, so it does away with the money-losing proposition of flushing ink into the waste well. The inks are also pigment based, meaning very long life and a brief initial report at Luminous Landscape indicates pretty awesome print quality. The iPF5000 is a serious printer presenting some serious competition to the Epson 4800. However, I still ended up buying the 4800 instead of waiting. One reason is that I know Epson printers; they’re the devil you know whereas the Canon is the devil I don’t know and it’s never wise to be the first kid on the block to buy the new toy. Better to let some other bloke beta test that first generation and then sample the wares once everything has been hashed out and all of its qualities are known, which is the case with the 4800. I knew about the black ink swapping issue, so I made an informed choice about buying it. I also made a calculated choice that I would rarely, if ever, print on matte papers with the 4800, because I’m a luster paper kind of guy for almost all my printing needs - or, you could say that knowing about the ink swapping issue made it very clear to me that I had to decide one or the other for my 4800. As much as I’ve groused and wasted many electrons waxing rather un-poetically about the Epson ink swapping foibles, I’m still a very happy camper with my 4800, but I doubt that I would be so happy if I liked matte papers as much as glossy papers. The only nagging question mark is how much of a difference the red, blue, and green inks in the Canon printer might change the equation for print quality and I’m sure the Epson engineers are working madly to get the 4800 replacement ready to go that will match the new Canon. The other, bigger reason why I bought the 4800 was because it was available immediately and back in the beginning of May, I thought I was going to have a booking needing the big print capability and production-level output. That didn’t turn out to be the case as I lost out on the job, but I’m certainly not unhappy about “having” to buy the 4800 sooner than expected. However, I do admit that if I had waited longer for when the Canon was widely available, I’d be taking a very long and hard look at this new unit. In addition to looking at what Canon was coming out with, I also briefly considered the even larger Epson 7800 to get 24-inch wide printing capability. There was just one minor detail: when would I ever print something, anything, 24-inches wide? Related to this, could I even produce a high enough quality image file to print this wide? As good as the Nikon D2X and D200 are, I’m thinking that 24-inches wide is pushing it for their print capabilities. I still have a good medium format kit and if I were to scan at high resolution, like 4000 ppi, I’d have more than enough to print at 24-inches wide, but if I’m honest with myself, when the heck am I going to seriously shoot with film again? I’m as digital as Data from Star Trek the Next Generation, but unlike Data, I've no desire to become "analog." There’s also a small issue of not having a scanner that could scan my 120 format film at 4000 ppi, but I digress. In emailing back and forth with another Epson user, he made an excellent point about why the 4800 would be more desirable than the 7800, the tray feed. As far as I know, when printing on sheets, you would have to feed them individually with the larger printers like the 7800, or else use a roll. Because much of my intended output is for an A3 sized portfolio album, and because Epson makes their Premium Luster in A3 size, a tray is far more convenient to be able to setup a large print job, send it through, then go away and come back to a stack of finished prints. Using a roll and cutting would cut severely into my time to sit on my ass, watch sports on TV, drink beer and eat chips until the wife nags me to mow the lawn – unless of course you can setup the big Epsons to automatically cut your print into perfect sheet sizes after finishing a print job, which maybe they can thanks to the built-in cutter. Speaking of which, the 4800 has a built-in cutter too, but I don’t expect to print on rolls.
Life
doesn’t stand still, you keep growing (literally) and changing
and sooner or later that wedding photo is coming down (just as
soon as my wife lets me). I was also short in necessary funds
for the 7800, but tis but a quibble. After seeing some framed 24-inch wide prints at an
I also considered the HP DesignJet 130 printer, because it’s cheaper and prints larger than the 4800. The DJ 130 is capable of 24-inch wide printing, but it follows the old style 6-ink design with only a single black ink cartridge, so its questionable whether or not the DJ 130 can produce the same B&W quality as the Epson K3 printers. The DJ130 is also a dye-ink printer and the ink sets do their best with only a small selection of HP papers in order to achieve archival print quality measured in decades, whereas the Epson printers can be used with a wide variety of papers and still achieve archival print quality. However, since I like printing on luster finish papers, the DJ 130 could still have worked for me as a dedicated color printer if I were to use HP’s satin paper, but that would be rather limiting and not as flexible as the 4800. The DJ 130 prints are also susceptible to moisture damage whereas the Epson K3 prints are quite immune to moisture. I did a finger lick test on a sample print sent to me by HP and the inks smeared and smudged even though the sample print was at least a year old. Doing the same to a few days old K3 print did produce a mark on the unprinted surface of the Premium Luster paper that could be seen at an angle (same as when looking out for bronzing), but the printed area was fine. On a whole, I didn’t find enough offered by the DJ 130 to negate the desire for the 4800, but this is a promising design by HP and if HP wanted to, they’d have a good platform to produce an archival ink printer using their Vivera ink set. A new 24-inch wide capable DJ 130 with a couple more light black inks in the mix at the same price point would put a lot of pressure on both Epson and Canon and I’d be very interested in such a hypothetical printer if and when the time comes that I need a larger format printer. About the 4800
R2400 on top of the 4800 >> People that have seen the R2400 in my home office would remark about how large and snazzy it looks for which I replied, you ain’t seen nothing yet baby! You just wait until I can afford my dream printer then you’ll see what large is J The 4800 has never failed to impress anyone that’s visited since it arrived, but then all of them have been non-photographers, so it wasn’t too hard to be impressed. Heck, even I was still impressed by the size and I knew what I was in for, although the longer I live with it, the more I've gotten use to the size so that now, the 4800 doesn't seem so big anymore.
I did give it try for about a day, but the 4800 exerts so much force when it’s printing that the desk experienced a whole lotta shakin’ going on. This was not going to work for the long-term. The desk has since been strengthened with stronger legs, but I remedied the placement of the 4800 by stealing an old wood coffee table that my daughters were using as their drawing and coloring table – don’t worry, I setup a new desk for them as a replacement. The 4800 now sits in isolation and is connected to the CPU with a 15-foot USB 2 printer cable. Setup took about an hour from loading the ink cartridges and flipping levers up and down to facilitate the charging of the printers, to doing a print head check. The 4800 not only shakes a lot when in operation, it’s also quite loud due to some internal fans turning on and expelling a fair bit of air through some vents at the side and back of the printer.
I initially thought that the fans were for cooling, which seemed somewhat odd given that inkjet printers generally don’t generate a lot of heat and given that the R2400 does not need fans. However, I was later advised by a friend that attended an Epson Print Academy Track 2 session that the fans are not for cooling, but to suck the paper down after ink has been applied to it. If I have my facts straight, no rollers are used to move the paper after it has been printed on, which is just dandy to avoid a complaint heard of older Epson printers – roller track marks on the printed surface.
The 4800 cartridges are massive compared to the ones for the R2400 and it’s no stretch to imagine that the carts hold at least 10x the amount of ink of the smaller ones. Whereas the R2400 cartridges are small enough to fit right into the ink carrier that also hold the print heads and move and back forth when printing, the 4800 cartridges are stationary (for obvious reasons).
R2400
ink cartridge compared to a 4800 ink cartridge and where those
massive cartridges reside in the 4800 (right side set of inks
and below them is the ink waste well)
The four primary colors of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black are located on the lower left, front side of the printer. Light Cyan, Light Magenta, Light Black and Light Light Black are found at the lower right, front side of the printer. Both sets are hidden behind a dark, translucent plastic door. The front feeding tray normally sticks out about six-inches from the main base of the printer and accommodates paper sizes from the maximum 17x22 inches down to 4x6 inches. As you use larger paper sizes, the feeding tray telescopes out to accommodate the larger sizes. As of yet, I’ve not used any really thick papers through the feeding tray with the 4800 primarily fed a diet of Epson’s Premium series Luster, Glossy, and Semi Gloss papers. According to the Canadian distributor, the new fine art papers from Hahnemuhle and Crane are only now beginning to ship, but only in rolls and sheet sizes are still on back order, so it will be some time before I’ll be able to feed the 4800 some gourmet paper fare. I may try to get my hands on the new Innova paper too from US sources and do another round of paper reviews of the three new papers that offer a semi gloss texture and finish with matte paper archival qualities. Add in the thickness and one of these papers is likely to become my long-term reference.
Quality
Telescoping paper tray with cover on >> If you’re already an R2400 user then just think of the 4800 as the same printer except 5x bigger (but also nearly 5x heavier and louder) for only 2.5x the cost. The quality of course is excellent for color and in my humble opinion, excellent for B&W. However, because I’m not a darkroom practitioner and have no history with quality B&W prints from the chemical darkroom, my comments should be taken with that consideration. Some old hands at the chemical darkroom still consider the K3 and other inkjet B&W prints to be not good enough, while others claim that they’re every bit as good as what comes out of the chemical darkroom.
I lean more towards Lenswork editor and publisher Brooks Jensen’s opinion that inkjet quality B&W prints (or, as Jensen would say, pigment on paper) are every bit as valid as traditional darkroom prints, just different. Digital prints are produced via a different process, technology, and technique and comparing the two to say which is absolutely better is not the best thing to do. Each should be appreciated for their particular method of producing a print and their particular strengths. When comparisons are made, they’re often done on the weak points of the medium instead of the positive.
The supplied profiles for the 4800 used in Best Photo resolution (1440 dpi) are okay and will get you going immediately after setup, but you would still benefit from creating custom profiles to get the most out of the printer. Thanks to writing some reviews in the past, I’m fortunate enough to be able to call upon some custom profiles created with some excellent printer profiling suites. Another alternative is to invest in a RIP, such as ColorByte’s ImagePrint. This custom RIP costs CAN $1000 for the 4800 and takes over from the default Epson printer driver for your printing needs. There are two versions, one is a standalone application that requires you to bring the image into ImagePrint for printing and the other is a Postscript version that allows you to use ImagePrint for printing within your original editing application, e.g. Photoshop. ImagePrint also provides a large number of custom profiles for use with many third-party papers and many users have lauded these profiles. Enough so that if you were seriously considering a high-end printer profiling package such as from X-Rite or GretagMacbeth, you would also have to put ImagePrint on your shortlist of contenders.
ImagePrint also offers a way to avoid the ink swapping blues of the 4800 and its larger brothers, the 7800 and 9800. It’s called the Phatte Black system and what it does is it swaps out the original Light Light Black ink cartridge for the second Matte or Photo black ink cartridge. You have to fool the printer into thinking that it still has a regular Light Light Black so the Phatte Black cartridge requires a special chip to facilitate this. I noticed that the light inks tend to get used more when printing with glossy papers and matte papers tend to use more of the solid colors, so taking out the Light Light Black is likely to affect glossy paper printing. However, the ImagePrint profiles are suppose to take into account the lack of Light Light Black and remix to minimize any differences and effects of potential bronzing. It’s a novel approach to a potentially vexatious and expensive issue of having to swap out black inks when switching from glossy to matte or vice versa. For me, I’m not keen to spend another $1000 on ImagePrint at this time and because I do most of my printing on luster finished papers, I can avoid having to swap out black inks. Interestingly, at the June 17, 2006 Epson Print Academy session in Vancouver, the presenter, Vincent Versace, was asked about using third-party RIPs with the K3 printers. Versace admitted that he used a ColorBurst RIP in his own studio, but he didn’t recommend RIPs in general given how good Epson’s Advanced B&W mode printing is. While not mentioning any names, it seemed to me that Versace was not keen on the ImagePrint RIP with a cautionary comment that using RIPs may degrade the archival quality of K3 prints as opposed to using the Epson driver to set the appropriate ink mix. Since I only print on a handful of papers, having access to dozens and dozens of different profiles isn’t of interest to me and being able to set and adjust multiple images on a sheet of paper is handled by Qimage in my digital darkroom. But, I don’t like to burn bridges, so I won’t say I’ll never use ImagePrint, just not at this particular time. With so little to say about the 4800’s quality, which is just simply excellent, maybe we should reflect on whether or not the 4800 makes sense for you. Cost Factor The 4800 is about CAN $2400 to buy and the R2400 is about CAN $1100 with the larger 7800 about another $1000 more than the 4800. I’ve already looked into why the 7800 isn’t the best choice for me, but maybe for some of you who are seriously considering the R2400, the 4800 would be the better choice. Yes, the 4800 costs more than double as the R2400, but if you’re a prolific printer, the costs can be recouped from ink costs savings. I’ve come across some discrepancies about the ink costs because I’m not exactly sure whether the smaller R2400 cartridges at $20 per contain 11 ml or 20 ml of ink. For the 4800, it’s easy because they only come in two sizes, 110 ml and 220 ml at approximately CAN $70 and $110 per size respectively. At 110 ml, this works out to be (pre-tax) $0.63 per ml and at 220 ml, this works out to be $0.50 per ml. For the R2400, assuming 11 ml, this works out to be $1.81 per ml, but if the cartridges hold 20 ml, then this figure would be $1 per ml. As you can see, if the R2400 cartridges really do hold 11 ml of ink, Epson is making away like a bandit (as do most other main brand printer companies selling their own inks). In either case, the 4800 represents significant cost savings for those into producing a large number of prints of all sizes. On an economic basis, the 4800 is clearly the better buy because the ink savings will eventually pay for the higher initial cost of purchase and thereafter actually put money back in your pocket compared to the R2400 operating costs. However, not everyone can accommodate the much larger printer and that may still be the deciding factor. I would really try to find the room to move up to the 4800 instead of settling for the R2400, even if other things have to be sacrificed. I use to have my big hi-fi setup in my home office, but I took it down and stored it away in anticipation of eventually getting the 4800. I love my music, but something had to give in my limited space and now I make do with an iPod feeding a pre-amp feeding some powered monitor speakers in my office.
A shot of the large box that 17x22 size paper comes in with letter sized and Super B size packages sitting on top. The actual 17x22 paper is smaller than the box though as there's internal buffering inside the box, as seen below.
Conclusion This isn’t so much a review, as a summation or affirmation of my purchasing decision and how I’m living with the large Epson 4800 in my digital darkroom. There isn’t much more to say beyond excellent in terms of image quality. However, the use of custom profiles is highly recommended to get the best from the beast for color printing. I’m still using the original set of ink cartridges and it may be a while yet before I have to worry about replacing those carts. When the time comes to do so, I’ll likely go with the 110 ml size first instead of the 220 ml size as I determine how much ink I’ll actually use over the short term. With up to 12 megapixels of resolution available from my D-SLRs, I’m quite comfortable in being able to produce excellent quality prints up to 16x20 inches. Indeed, the purchase of the D2X led naturally to the Epson 4800 as a logical purchase to maximize the image potential of the new camera. The two went hand-in-hand for trying to set myself up as a part time wedding photographer.
The 4800 has the obvious weakness of not being able to accommodate both Matte and Photo Black inks at the same time and for those that like to swing both ways, I feel your pain, but I only swing one way and thus, this one weakness isn’t a practical issue for me J However, I would have still appreciated having the choice (would also make reviewing papers of all types easier). If you need 17-inch wide printing capabilities and do indeed swing both ways between matte and glossy papers, but can wait, the Canon iPF5000 is an obvious contender. I’m also a bit sheepish in posting this article so soon after purchase without long-term experience yet. I’ve only been asked by the 4800 once to do a power cleaning, for which I decided no, because of comments from others that indicate this is not all necessary and wastes a large amount of ink. There have been no operating issues to speak off otherwise; it just works as I ask of it. I would also pass along a tip that others gave to me that the ink waste well that will eventually need replacement as it fills with ink from cleaning cycles, does not need to be replaced with a wholly new well at CAN $50 a pop. The old one can be emptied of its original absorbent material and “refilled” with feminine sanitary napkins. I’ll still buy one new waste well for immediate swapping, but I plan to recycle the original one back in with such replacement napkins. If I seem devoid of new things to say about the 4800 vis a vis the R2400, it’s because they are the same in print quality output and overall, they have been much less of a pain to operate than my old and now departed Epson 1270 dye-based printer. That one changed behavior with each new cartridge change from reliable to being close to thrown out the window in exasperation with its clogging. This goes against some of the forum chatter that pigment-based printers are notorious for clogging if not used for a period of time and I admit guilt in saying the same thing myself, but to date, no clogging to speak of with any of the three pigment ink printers I have in-house (Epson CX4800 being the other). And this is despite not being used for weeks at a time, especially with the seldom-used CX4800. Knock on wood that my luck continues. That being said, I wouldn’t mind if Epson made the print heads user replaceable like HP does with its high-end printers. Too late for me now, but this would be a step in the right direction for future printers in addition to being able to accommodate all the ink cartridges made for the 4800’s replacement. I'd also like a better printer driver than what the 4800 uses now. The R2400's advanced settings driver is much nicer to work with than the 4800's rather consumer-look. The 4800 has some design foibles, but overall, it is still a very highly recommended product that should serve me well for years to come. August 3, 2006 - My friend Rob Greer (of the L-brackets review) just bought an Epson 4800 and has had a very frustrating turn fighting with the margins in trying to get a 12x18 inch image centered on 13x19 inch sheets. He contacted Epson tech support and received the following response and discovered some limitations to the way the 4800 prints due to its design.
The .55 inch margin for the trailing edge of the print is because of the fan units used by the 4800 to move the paper along the print path. No rollers are used after the paper is pulled from the tray and into the print path and this avoids a problem that afflicts some consumer printers of "pizza" roller tracks on the printed surface (I saw such tracks on occasion with my old Epson 1270). Epson giveth and Epson taketh away. I haven't had issues with the margins with my own 4800 except for trying to print four images centered on letter sized sheets, which I don't do too often, so I'm not that critical about it. I also don't print on 13x19 paper very often either, as it's an oddball size for me, as I prefer to print traditional portrait sizes such as 8x10, 11x14, 16x20. I also like to store my prints in Prat portfolio-style leather albums and these max out at A3 size (12x16). So, if you wanted a dead centered image, size your image to fit within the .55 inch margins on the leading and trailing edges, or use roll paper, as Rob will soon be doing. Readers Comments
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Correspondence & About this website Copyright © 1998-2008 Edwin Leong |
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It
always seems that by the time I’m ready to talk about a particular
piece of equipment, it’s already yesterday’s news. So it is with
the Epson 4800, which while still current in the Epson lineup,
is starting to look a little old now that there’s a new Canon
printer on the block showing off its wares.
16x20
print size (at right is a shot of the first 16x20 print fresh
out of the 4800) is also a good compromise between large and impressive
and narcissistically large and self-indulgent for framing and
hanging a huge print of one’s self. We have a 20x24 inch canvas
wedding print hanging on the wall and frankly, I’m getting tired
of seeing myself about a decade and twenty-five pounds of sludge
ago. 
I
knew what kind of size I’d be dealing with by buying the 4800
because I’ve seen the older 4000 in a store a few times. It’s
approximately three-feet wide, two-feet deep and just over a foot
high, and weighs in around 85 lbs.
After
unpacking the 4800 from 
The
4800 comes supplied with 110 ml size cartridges and initially
I thought I’d have to buy some more very quickly due to the warnings
attached to the printer that first charging would consume most
of the ink. Eight cartridges are supplied with Photo Black included
instead of Matte Black. A black ink cartridge changing kit is
also supplied (seen at right) that includes three more cartridges,
but I hope to never use this kit. 
The
quality of the 4800 prints is quite honestly, anticlimactic. I
had been 
Telescoping
paper tray with cover off >>
Letter
sized sheets loaded, print surface side down >>
Roll
feeder in the 4800's "boot" (trunk) as they say in the
UK >>
