Digital BW, The Print

I see it a little different.  Let me explain my point of view.

The inkjet market is tremendously competitive and Epson feels the heat
from HP, Canon and to a lessor extent Lexmark and others.  HP is far
larger than Seiko/Epson and is the  dominant market leader in printers
and plotters.  Canon is a much stronger brand in the photo market. 
Epson is by no means safe from HP or Canon unless they stay
significantly ahead in product. This has driven them to invest heavily
in R&D and rapidly bring innovations to market.

Epson also feels some heat from the media cloners. This has motivated
them to use some nasty printer/ink lock-in schemes.

In the late 80's/early 90's, many experts/scientists thought that
piezo head technology was limited and could not be drastically
improved.  Epson felt differently and invested in piezo vs thermal
inkjets like HP, Canon.  The results took a fairly long time to bear
fruit, and HP took an enormous lead in inkjet sales with Canon and
Epson trailing.

The great benefit of piezo is flexibility in ink types. This allowed
some small companies to introduce wide format printers for pigment
inks using Epson heads.  Aftermarket companies like Cone, Mediastreet
and MIS introduced pigment and B&W inksets for the Epson dye printers,
giving use alternatives for archival printing.

Later Epson decided to introduce pigmented color inks, and we've seen
very rapid improvement.  The original Archival Pigments had very
limited gamut. Epson inovated with microencapsulated Ultrachrome
pigments which were an big improvement in color gamut, but su**ked on
glossy.  Epson added GLOP for great glossy printing. Now they come out
with K3 for improved Dmax and better gamut.

Like everyone, I despise the various bundling techniques that Epson
uses to lock out ink clones.  But, as we've seen, even the nasty
chipped cartridges were quickly hacked and alternative inks are
available.  Some are innovative, some are clones, but we have a choice.

MIS, Mediastreet and the others are pretty small companies, but
they've been successful with quality aftermarket products for the
Epson printers.  The paper companies are probably even more successful.

The worldwide inkjet printer, media and ink market was $33 billion US,
so I think the economics are viable for aftermarket products.  The
biggest barrier seems to be the hundreds of cartridge types.  The d**m
carts are expensive, and we pay through the nose for ink in them. 
Inkjet ink in carts is the most expensive fluid on the planet.

It will be interesting to see how fast the aftermarket companies can
respond to k3.


"john dean" <deanwork2003@y...> wrote:
> 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. ...

 ,,,