Digital BW, The Print

That is a good point in that there are already factories set up to produce such printers, and these companies are being killed by the big three selling their printers at or below cost in order to capture the ink market, and in the process limiting the kinds of products that are available. I assume Canon has pretty much killed off what was left of Roland and Mimaki in the very wide sizes.

 As a business strategy there is nothing immoral about the majors doing that, it just seem like there may be another strategy that could create alliances of other kinds of products. 

But I wouldn't limit the concept to black and white only. It seems to me with the way that Epson has totally locked out third party color inks, (Canon and HP will have to confront that as well now that there are cloned inks to haunt them as well) that there are other reasons to look at such a concept.

I'm still using two restored Epson 7000s (made by Mutoh?) and I can't tell you how fantastic it is to have no chips at all. The only thing these old relics lack is a a slightly finer dot and a little speed, but with K6 and QTR they even function well today. And they are built a hell of a lot better than most of the machines that came after them. I've never even thought much about their waste tanks either and this is like 10 year old technology.

j

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, C D Tobie <CDTobie@...> wrote:
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> 
> On Nov 7, 2010, at 12:58 PM, tboleyyh wrote:
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> > I don't know what the price would be for the mystery printer
> 
> There have been third party companies who have licensed the big three's inkjet technologies and sold printers for specialty markets; in fact, at one time thats the only way one could get Epson heads in a wide format machine. Traditionally these specialty printers have cost more (we're talking a lot more) than the printer models from the big three. Approaching one of these companies with the idea of supplying a moderately priced machine for the B&W market would be interesting. 
> 
> This would be one of their more affordable printer models, configured for standard pigment inks, without a need for a huge number of channels (though there's no reason not to fill up whatever channels exist already), perhaps with support from the same company's RIP, but also with the intent of it being driven by QTR (which kinda implies an Epson-based system). It would be an open device, with no chip limitations. Anyone ever asked Mutoh, Kodak (who acquired Encad years ago) or any of the other companies if they would be interested in developing a market plan to see if this is feasible at a pricepoint that would not put it out of the hands of the end users it would be intended for? I haven't met with any of these companies for at least a couple of years, so I have no real sense of their current situations.
> 
> C. David Tobie
> Global Product Technology Manager
> Digital Imaging & Home Theater
> CDTobie@...
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> Datacolor
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