Epson Stylus Photo R3000
There’s nothing like the thrill of seeing an image appear magically in the developer. It’s a wonderful feeling and one of the reasons I still love working in the darkroom even though such occasions are few and far between. It has to be said that seeing a print emerge from an inkjet printer is not quite as exhilarating but there is still excitement at seeing the fruit of your photographic endeavours.
Digital printing has never been easier but it is surprising how relatively few photographers take control of their own printing. Many rely on commercial printers and many don’t bother and just upload to websites. There are valid reasons why photographers don’t print at home. Early on, a big one was print longevity but that no longer applies and modern inkjet prints have archival lightfast qualities, better than prints made on materials such as Fuji Crystal Archive. Check out www.wilhelm-research.com.
Another major reason is cost. High quality paper is not cheap and the cost of inks is an even bigger issue. Replacement ink cartridges are expensive and they don’t hold much ink and before you know it the ink-running-low indicator is blinking away. Epson has addressed this with its new R3000. In its Stylus R2880, each ink cartridge holds just under 12ml of ink and sells for £12. In each R3000 cartridge, there’s a 25.9mm of ink and each cartridge sells for £24. You pay twice as much per cartridge but you get over twice as much ink. Bigger cartridge capacity is just one selling point of the R3000. It can handle paper sizes to A3+ (19x13in or 48.3cmx32.9cm), works with a very broad range of materials including Epson’s latest fine art finishes, accessory holders to take roll paper are included in the package, and it can print onto CDs. The R3000 inkset is Epson’s well-known and highly respected UltraChrome K3, a system that has two magentas, two cyans and four types of black ink to give the best possible tonal range for monochrome printing.
{pullquote}I was getting spot on colour prints from the outset. Print quality is excellent{/pullquote}
It’s worth just spending a little time on the R3000’s black ink configuration – the same system is used in other Epson printers, ie the Pro 3880 and the cheaper R2880. On glossy and semi-glossy finishes the Photo Black is used in conjunction with Light Light Black and Light Black as well as the coloured inks, while with fine art finishes such as Velvet Fine Art and Hot Press Natural, Matte Black is used in place of the Photo Black. The printer tells you to switch between the two black inks when a sheet of appropriate paper is loaded. On the Mac driver, certain surface options are greyed out and you have to enter the page set-up option and choose the correct paper feed option first.
The ink-changing process is handled by a menu and it’s all over in under three minutes. Clearly switching from one type of black to another does consume ink so it makes sense to rationalise your printing to avoid too much to-ing and fro-ing between finishes. Printer set-up is really easy and it doesn’t take long. With the inks loaded in the right bays, it’s just a matter of waiting for the printer to prepare itself and then for you to install the drivers. I used the R3000 with a Mac and a Windows Vista PC and was getting first-rate prints very quickly. One thing that is noticeable on the two platforms is that there is much more fine-tuning control on the Windows driver. It is true there are potentially more things to go wrong but having that extra control is beneficial and it doesn’t take long to get used to going through a mental short-list before hitting the Print button. Finishes such as gloss and semi-gloss are loaded via the top slot while the fine art finishes are loaded through the front tray – put the paper into position, you tell the printer and it does the rest and lets you know when the media is correctly loaded. Epson offers a very broad choice of media. For this review, I used Traditional Photo Paper, Premium Gloss and Semi-gloss, Hot Press Natural and Velvet Fine Art, printing colour and black & white images.
Using Epson’s profiles and my calibrated Mac, I was getting spot on colour prints from the outset. Print quality is excellent. I printed A3+ images in Photo, Superfine and Super Photo modes on glossy material and in a blind test among the office team, no one could see a beneficial difference in image quality at normal viewing distances. The first two modes print at 1440dpi and the last-named prints at 5760dpi.
On my converted monochrome files, I found that the first couple of prints looked flat, but a curves tweak resolved this and delivered the contrast I wanted on gloss and fine art finishes. I must say, the Hot Press Natural prints looked stunning but this is a finish that works out at £3.50 for a sheet of A3+. In this test, I made a total of 29 A3+ prints and I did check the status of the cartridges before handing the unit back to Epson. The Photo Black was quite well down and the change indicator was flashing, but levels in the other colours were still good.
The Verdict
It’s easy to use and has the option of using rolls of paper for those panoramas, and will print on a wide range of finishes. On the downside, it has a relatively large footprint and is not that much smaller than the Pro 3880 which can produce A2-size prints – but it doesn’t take roll paper. The front feed option for fine art media on the R3000 is handy because it saves on space.
In terms of cost, an R3000 cartridge holds 25.9ml of ink and costs £24 each. That works out at 92.6p per millilitre. By comparison a R2880 cartridge costs £12 and holds 11.4ml so the cost per millilitre is 105p, a saving of 12.4p per millilitre. Put another way, the R3000 tank holds 227% (2.27 times) more ink and is twice the price of the R2880’s but the saving in ink cost is around 12%. This is taking the figures at their face value because obviously ink is saved from the charging process when a new cartridge is loaded.
If you want an A3+ printer of the finest quality, the R3000 is potentially it, but whether the running costs are lower in the longer term only time will tell.
Taken from the June 2011 issue of Advanced Photographer magazine