Digital BW, The Print

That hits the  nail on the head, but it much easier said than done. Epson 
started out with a pile of cash from Seiko's decades of profits from quartz 
watches and the micro chip development lab that went along with it. They 
simply stumbled into dominating photography. It was never planned in the 
beginning.  I started out back when Photoshop 4 was still the standard using 
their Photo Stylus 7000. It used imperment inks of course but I was printing 
super nice drum scanned photographs on the Hahnemuhle German etching 
paper that Lumijet was starting to sell. They looked so close to Iris prints that it 
was scary.

I don't think Epson had any idea what they were about to do with that little 
office printer that happened to print great photographs. 

What Epson has that others don't is a huge advertising budget, a global 
infastructure for manufacturing and long term electronics investments and 
associations. None of that is easy for a start up to come by, even one with 
cash. It seems to me that it would take a huge established company like 
Cannon or Sony or HP to produce real competition. I just don't see it 
happening immediately because of the lead Epson has. But we can all dream 
of it. HP has been nothing but a giant disappointment. It reminds me of the 
analogy of GM and Toyota. 

But like you say, as long as Epson controlls the next generation of printers 
they will always have everyone else off balance. I keep thinking that sooner or 
later all these differnt inksets will become too costly to produce and store on 
such a huge scale and they will have to slow down. But so far that hasn't been 
the case. The one thing they can't stop us from doing is using their older 
printers with other inksets and I for one will continue to do just that.

John




  What we need is some newcomers on the block with
> real innovation in ink design and hardware independent solutions.  With 
good
> cartridge manufacturers the latter can be outsourced.  The former requires
> some good old scientific innovation.  Or have the cloners deprived us of
> incentives for such chemists to bang their heads together?