Digital BW, The Print

I've been following this discussion of the R1800 and BO capabilities with
some interest, as I'm looking at possibly getting an R1800 (at some
point...) for color printing and would love to be able to turn out great B&W
prints on it as well. There's been a lot of discussion about how Epson
engineers have no idea of the demand, how out of touch they are, etc.

If that's true, why don't we, as a group, let them know how much demand
there is for BO printing, or any kind of genuine B&W support for that
matter? Let's send them a letter signed by everyone on this list who's
interested. Maybe they'll listen. Imagine if even one fifth of the 5,550
people currently subscribed to this list participated. Even one tenth!

If you want, I'd be happy to compose a draft letter, if people can suggest
(and then, um, *agree upon*) what to say... and then somehow we could figure
out later how everyone can "sign" it - maybe people could e-mail me their
names and postal addresses offline and I could just list them. Something
like that.

My humble suggestion would be to start simple, for example just first
letting them know that there's this huge B&W-printing community, and asking
if BO features could be enabled and if not, why not, and/or asking why light
gray was removed, etc. Also maybe we could ask for the contact information
of someone whom we in the B&W printing community can contact directly. Then
once we've gotten an answer from them, we'll have opened a dialogue and
perhaps will be able to get answers more easily in the future.

What do you all think of the idea?

Of course another option would be that everyone just sends in their own
letters. I just called Epson's public relations office and the woman there
suggested writing a letter first to Epson USA's corporate headquarters, and
in the letter that we request some specific e-mail addresses for
corresponding in the future. The address she gave me is:

Epson America Inc.
3840 Kilroy Airport Way
Long Beach, CA 90806
(USA)

I also found this contact information for Epson R&D which I thought might
possibly be useful in getting in contact with engineers:

EPSON Research and Development, Inc.
Corporate Headquarters
150 River Oaks Parkway, Suite 225
San Jose, CA 95134
(USA)
Tel (408) 952-6000 (country code for U.S. is 1)
Fax (408) 952-6001

And this:
Epson Palo Alto Laboratory (EPAL): The focus of EPAL, a Silicon Valley
establishment with a tremendous reputation, is on cutting-edge work in
digital imaging technologies for cameras, copiers, printers, scanners,
projectors and the Internet.

Epson Palo Alto Laboratory
3145 Porter Drive, Suite 104
Palo Alto, CA 94304
(650) 843-9100, (650) 843-9106 (Fax)
Email: epal.info@...

So anyway, there you go, hope this starts something interesting... and if
anybody already has contacts for Epson engineers, please let us know. Or
maybe someone will be able to find some Epson engineers at the PMA show and
get their business cards (hey, don't tell them you're going to post their
contact info on an Internet list!)

--
Peter Aronson
Mexico City