Digital BW, The Print

"richardeskin" <richard.eskin@...> wrote:
>
> ... I have heard that Epson has made it either impossible or illegal to use third party inks with that [newest (X900)] series of printers.


I doubt Epson will ever by totally successful at stopping the use of their printers with third party inks.  And, they don't need to be.  I suspect they've put up enough barriers to stop a major third party color competitor with the latest machines, but their systems will be cloned/hacked with time.

Frankly, I'm not sure how much it matters if the latest wide format machines are not available for a couple of years after introduction.  We have excellent, new desktop printers available for cheap and also excellent used and new (7880) wide format printers available.  There are limits as to how many printers it makes sense for a small B&W outfit to support.

Note that with B&W it's rather easy to have a matte and glossy system in a single printer.  The MIS glossy carbons as midtones, including a PK as the darkest midtone, and then Eboni in the MK spot supports matte and glossy without even the ink loss from switching lines.  That is what my old "K4+" did.  (See http://www.paulroark.com/BW-Info/4K+.pdf)  With a K3 type of printer you can have a lot of carbon inks in there along with the needed (OEM for top quality) color toners.  If I were to go that route again, I'd test whether the Epson LM and LC carts, as is, would plug into my 7800 and be compatible with the MIS 7800 carts.  They may well be.

Paul
www.PaulRoark.com