Digital BW, The Print

The very few times that Epson upgraded older models showed that either
it was too expensive for what it delivered: 7000>7500, 9000>9500, didn't
get much interest: 10000 (1280) LM and Yellow dye inks for the 7000-9000
or the upgrade period was so short that nobody knew it was possible
10000>10600 (only John Dean knew about it :-).

Ernst


I'm not the only one that knew about that. It has been discussed on these 
forums before. A collegue here had the same delemma and decision to make 
and decided to go for a 9600 and traded in his 10K one for one for it. They did 
that because he had complained about his 10K's inability to work well on 
high-speed mode. That was back in the days when if you were a 10K owner 
they gave you temporary special treatment because they knew very well what 
they were in the process of doing. 

The problem was that the user had to pay for this upgrade  ( or firmware 
changeover, whatever you want to call it ) and it wasn't cheap. At that point 
almost no one knew anything about Ultrachrome except that it had brighter 
reds and yellows that sacrificed half the longevity, additionally you didn't have 
the advantage of the additional "light" black. That didn't seem like a good 
bargain and Epson knew people would be reluctant to change to an unknown 
quantity when we had spent the last 3 years touting the advantages of the 
CF''s extreme color permanence which was unheard of for photography at 
that time. Remember, this is also at a time when the tests of Premier Art spray 
were not available. So, almost no one, including me took advantage of this 
situation. It just didn't seem practical with the knowledge we had. They could 
have sent us out a written document explaining the pros and cons, but they 
didn't really want to do it either. This all sounds like ancient history, which it is, 
eventhough it was only a few years ago. Now I truely belive that their stragegy 
is in part  a continual attempt to keep all 3rd party ink companies from 
developing inksets for their printers. It makes sense for a company that makes 
its money on billions of dollars worth of ink.

John