After the trials and tribulations of my Epson 2100 clogging problem, which is now looking very much like a print head fault (burnt out?) with an associated repair cost of ~£200, I decided to order a HP B9180.
I’ve been with Epson printers for many years, so this departure is real trek into the unknown. Like many people, I read a fair few reviews on the HP and a friend of mine got one a month back and the output looks superb.
Hopefully mine will be here early next week, so i’ll pass on my impressions in due course!
Why did I go for the HP?
Well, the TCO is lower, it has user changeable printheads, it re-maps clogged nozzles, it has the best lightfastness on the market, its pretty fast at output and it was significantly cheaper than the R2400. (I paid £380 for it) Plus, I don’t feel ready for an A2 printer (yet).
The downside is, the ink and paper are currently difficult to get hold of, but I have a truck load of Lyson paper and a spectrocolorimeter.
I have heard that Lyson paper is sourced from the same suppler as HP, but i’ll endeavour to spend sometime building some custom profiles for it using the PrintFix Pro v2.
I intended to move the Epson 2100 into B/W duty but decided to put it on the home network and let my lads use it for college work (documents etc). Now the 2100 is fitted with a CIS, it should prove economical for their use.
If anyone has any first hand info on the HP B9180, then feel free to let me know your thoughts!
Update 1
The HP B9180 arrived tonight, 60 mins later it was unpacked, close calibrated and ready to print.
I never heard so much clanking and grinding from a printer before, it really doesn’t sound healthy at all, but it passed all the checks with all nozzles firing ok. Although ink levels dropped to 70%!
HP don’t exactly excel themselves with free paper samples, you get 12 sheets of A4 gloss and 5 are used for calibration. HP also recommend that only their gloss is used for subsequent calibration. They would, wouldn’t they!
I ran a few glossy prints direct from CS2 via the HP plugin and my first impression was “very neutral”. No eye popping colours, no punch, no cast, just very neutral. The print quality in terms of ink on paper was exceptional, the full gloss output looks like a wet print, no gloss differential or bronzing. Personally. I’d prefer a little bit more saturation.
I then trawled the net for some default settings for other papers, namely Ilford Gallerie Smooth Pearl. This is a reasonably priced paper and I’ve used it a lot. The “user recommended” settings suggest a “soft gloss” profile and I printed off a few A4s, again very neutral, but still a little low in saturation.
Next up was the Lyson Pro Satin. I had no idea what profile to use, so I decided to stick with the soft gloss. The results suggested that I really need to build a custom profile, the colours were a little muddy and image seemed to look dirty. So thats the next challenge!.
Hopefully, the PrintFix Pro with new v2 software will do a good job. If so then i’ll reprofile the other papers to bring the saturation to my liking. e.g. what my calbrated eizo renders at 120cdm.
I suppose the biggest benefit is the printer drivers themselves, I use Silkypix and its very much limited on printer output, you get sRGB or AdobeRGB, but no paper profile support. The HP drivers gets round this by enabling you to select the input colorspace as AdobeRGB and then it manages the conversion to the selected paper profile. The ouput was very good, but again it lacked saturation.
Finally, I also managed to print using Qimage, just set the HP9180 to “application managed colour” and select the relevant profile in the Qimage dialogue.
So to summarise, very good quality output, prints defintely looks better than the Epson 2100, re smootheness of ink on paper sense, but it will need tweaking! I also expected it to be significantly faster than the 2100, but from hitting the go button to getting a delivered print it only seemed about 20% faster.
I’ll hopefully pass on my custom profile adventure shortly, Now to print a few targets. let them dry and start the measuring process!
Update 2
As I have quite a bit Lyson paper stock (Pro Satin, Pro Gloss and Matte), I decided to set about profiling the Vivera inkset for this media. I used the 225 patch set plus extended greys and have been very impressed with the output.
I personally found the Vivera inkset less vibrant (better than the saturated term I used earlier) than say the Lyson cave paint on the Epson 2100, however the HP stock profiles dont give this impression when soft proofing in CS2 on a calibrated Eizo. The screen looks vibrant but the output is less so.
Having now profiled the Lyson Pro Satin on the Vivera inkset, the soft proof and output are now almost identical but equally less vibrant, but photorealistic nonetheless.
There’s a very slight matte effect on a lower mid tone browns, possibly due to the mixture of MK an PK being used. But I also see this on other satin papers.
I also noticed that the PFPv2 gamut for the Lyson paper is wider on the blue but marginally less on the green.
So this experience tells me that the PFPv2 really does actually resolve lot of problems and concerns expressed but other users.
Next up will be the Lyson Pro Gloss!
