Digital BW, The Print

I'm still using a 9500 for color work, and see no real reasons to 
update to a newer model. Parts are cheap, easy to repair, no ink 
chips, a wealth of third party inks. The only thing I wish for is a 
light gray ink, but I'll over come that in some other way. Yes it is 
a little slower than a new machine, and you really need a RIP to get 
the best quality, but it still produces beautiful output. And the 
money you can save can be used to get things like a good RIP, or lots 
of paper, or better yet real color management tools. It's easy to rig 
a bootle feed ink system, and that makes it easy to clean out too. It 
takes me about 2 hours to completely empty and clean the ink path, so 
if I really want to, I can swop between color inks, and grayscale 
inks, or a mix of both (still doing research on this which leads me 
to a question for another thread). WOuld I like one of the new 
printers, sure... Then I could join the masses and make UltraGiclee 
prints (shakes head, walks away).

There was a little talk about the Canon printers over at DPReview 
when they first hit the USA, but initial reports were not too 
favorably. I suggest seeing a test before buying one. If you really 
want to watch your budget, you might look into a used Encad printer. 
Some of the 600x600 printers can be had for really cheap prices on 
the used market. For black and white use, these should do very well. 
For color use they were OK. Most of the Encad printers could use 
pigment inks through their thermal heads (Encad GO inks). The colors 
are a little more muted from this, but with Canon now using thermal 
squirt pigment ink, I would bet that better ink is not too far away. 
And for B/W work, it's hard to "burn" a carbon particle any more than 
it is already. To ad to the list, Mimaki, Mutoh, Roland, Colorspan 
are a few others, but they are mostly much more expensive. However 
with expensive you may get features like 8 to 12 inks, and hardware 
configuration so that the printer knows what to do with those 12 
inks. Just think, 6 color inks, plus 4 gray shades, 1 more for photo 
black, and one more for glop. That would be 6 blacks (matte, photo, 
and 4 light shades), plus CcMmY and the GLoss OPtimizer all in one 
printer (one very expensive printer). Sorry to add to your choices, 
probably just made you more confused about what to buy, sorry.


--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Paul Roark" 
<paul.roark@v...> wrote:
> Bernie,
> 
> > Using a 2200/UT7 right now, I nevertheless want to get a wide 
format
> > printer during this year. ...
> 
> A used 7500 was my initial route to this.  In some respects its 
better than
> the 7600 I just acquired.
> 
> Paul
> www.PaulRoark.com