Epson 7900 / 9900 discussion

[Elton McAleer]

Has anyone bought one of the new Epson printers yet? - And if so, how good have the RIP vendors been at creating new drivers/profiles? (e.g. Oris, EFI, GMG, Agfa Apogee etc)

I am also interested in what people feel is the biggest draw card for the new printers - is it

a) the expanded gamut (orange & green - particularly good for proofing specials)

b) the huge speed increase (finally a 24" and 44" epson that is as fast (and faster) than the last great epson 'workhorse' the 10600. (the 11880 is also super fast, but at 60" is bigger than most prepress needs)

c) the optional on board spectrophotometer - allowing remote/automated calibration across multiple sites

What else would people want to see in their LFP proofer? Personally I would like to see a 'White' ink introduced - with only a few high-end UV and Approval systems currently doing this, a white printing aqueous inkjet would clean up in the packaging prepress market.....

So, new Epsons - lets talk about them!

Cheers

Elton

 

[Prepress_Parasite]

I would also love to hear some feedback on the 9900 series proofers. We currently have a 9000 and a 10600 that we use for imposition proofs and contract proofs.

 

[rich apollo]

Aren't nozzle checks and cleaning cycles more automated, too?

 

[Bungle]

greetings all! be gentle with me this is my first time. we just took delivery of a 9900 for demo purposes here in Leeds, UK...it's sitting there waiting for our Epson rep to bring us some inks...i'm very excited to have the opportunity to test it out tomorrow...

 

[plaehn]

We have just ordered the 7900 and will take delivery at the end of january. We saw a demo, and it looked impressive. It's replacing a 7600 - i will post my initial impressions here when it's up and running.

 

[meddington]

I just had to create a spot color...PMS 021 Orange... on our uppity Kodak Approval using orange donor from the turn of the century, as its well outside our current Epson inkjet's gamut. I'm hoping the gamut of the x900 models with the orange ink helps this hue out. Would have saved us a lot of bread.

 

[GeoPrep]

Got it

Got it

We've been using the 9900 for several weeks and like it so far.. Driving it with the ORIS solution. We use the Fuji Final Proof as the target and it stands up very well! The dark reds are alittle to orange however. We like having the build-in spectro but still waiting on ORIS for the week calibration update. The Close loop setup worked very nice with the built in device.

I have a question for you... We've noticed the large ink carriages 700ML are costing us more per ML than the smaller ones 300ML. Is this the normal for ink jet printers?

Thanks

 

[mannyx]

we just bought 7900 2 weeks ago because we really appreciate the CMYKOG ink... but our EFI rip supplier still developing the patch for the 2 special color which is orange and green... so its not yet good to use it for proofing specially in CMYK because the color output is different to 7880... my advice is please check to your RIP supplier if the patch is already ok for 7900 or else you will encounter problem in light color specially in cmyk because the gamut is big and cannot controlled because of the rip.

 

[dimitri]

We just finished calibrating a new Epson 9900 on three different stocks! It took me just 2 days.
This machine is awesome, especially with the mounted spectro. I pressed the autocalibration button through the EFI ColorProofXF Friday evening and came back Monday to see a completed calibration with 9 iterations and an average DE of .46 to the GRACOL profile!

It is indeed fast, like 3 (?) times faster than 9800.

Don't know yet of its color gamut for spot colors. Some checks I did through ColorThink Pro display a considerably enhanced gamut than 9800... Oh! and the highest deviation from the hex colors as published in the pantone coated book was on the magenta @ 2.1 DeltaEcmc(2:1).

 

[mannyx]

dimitri...nice to hear from you that you made a profile in a different substrate.....

 

[dimitri]

i meant 'simulated' three different substrates... it's kind of a no-brainer

 

[lchandra]

Mannyx,

Are you using EFI Colorproof XF 3.x or 4.x. We're planning to switch to Colorproof XF 4.0 using new EPSON 9900s. EFI support told us that the 4.0 upgrade will support 9900 features.

 

[prepresscolor]

Well, the expanded gamut is something to see. I was privileged to be able to use the newest version of AbsoluteProof to profile a SP7900 and a GS6000. Wow, what a great color representation. Both the ability to print to a press (CMYK) profile or to a Hexachrome profile. The software was easy to use and the colors were great. The press profile was to a Gracol 7 standard and the Hex profile was to an older Pantone Hexachrome standard.