Digital BW, The Print

Since I've seen the odd question about the Epson R800 and R1800, I thought I'd briefly 
detail my own experience with the R800.

I own both a 2100 and R800. For those who don't know, the R800 dispenses with the inks 
that are the biggest contributors to metamerism: the light cyan, light magenta. It also has 
no light black. It has instead red and blue, plus the gloss optimiser. For colour work, this 
means prints with greater gamut, far less colour shifting under different lights, but 
compared to the 2100, less subtlety and without that gorgeous luminous quality on Semi-
Gloss.

With the 2100 I went through the whole learning process of magenta-toned and rainbow-
hued grayscale images. I finally had made a set of custom ICC profiles by an academic and 
artist who's research interests include printing with Epson UltraChrome. He made a set of 
profiles, balanced for a mix of daylight and incandescent light. However, on Epson Semi-
Gloss there were still observable colour shifts.

At that point I began to investigate QTR and now use that for the bulk of grayscale work 
on the 2100. My wife and I run a part-time wedding and portrait business and probably 1/
3 of the prints we sell are grayscale, much of that because our clients love the look of the 
QTR warm tones.

As an aside, I should note that on Archival Matte at least, one can obtain pretty neutral 
grayscale output through the print driver by having custom profiles made (and 
subsequently printing) using the Photo Realistic option instead of No Colour Management. 
Apparently it reduces the gamut, bad for colour work, but beneficial for grayscale 
neutrality.

With the R800 things were quite different. The supplied Epson ICC profiles yielded 
grayscale prints that had a rich, dark chocolate tone, different from the warm/sepia QTR 
output. It was quite pleasing to the eye. I then had made some custom profiles for colour 
work as the skin tones weren't always so good using the Epson ones.  Well, for the first 
time ever I had what looked to me to be dead-neutral grayscale on Semi-Gloss and 
Premium Glossy paper. They don't colour shift either. On Premium Glossy they really do 
look quite similar to darkroom prints, minus the hairs, dust spots, imperfect centring, etc.

That's the good news. The bad news is this: on just a handful of colour prints that have 
fine hair or fur (my daughter, a horse), the (Windows) print driver smears and fuzzes up 
the hair. It's really awful, looks like shocking compression or sharpening artefacts, except 
that the 2100 will render the same image perfectly. And it is the driver, not the profiles. 
Now, I haven't yet tested those same images in grayscale, but the possibility of the 
problem occurring gives me less confidence to rely on the R800; I need to check every 
print very carefully. It also doesn't give me the confidence to buy an R1800.

Apologies for the ramble.