Digital BW, The Print

Not to draw this out more, but I almost ditched my 1520 because I was 
so unhappy with the results. Then I decided to try that one more 
thing and threw another $80 at it for the RIP. Suddenly night turned 
into day, and despite being a 4 ink machine, it can still make a 
great print (if I resurrect it that is). Shortly after adding the RIP 
I went to pigment inks.

And as far as UV cure ink goes... doesn't look good. I contacted many 
ink manufacturers, and the only one to reply was Walter at Image 
Specialists, and they don't even make a UV cure ink. He said the 
chemicals in most of the UV cure inks are still too damaging to the 
Epson print heads, or at least the modern Epson heads. I'm almost 
positive that the heads used in the 5/7/9000 printers were used in 
the Mimaki, Mutoh, and maybe a couple other mild solvent printers. 
Apparently the viscosity of the UV cure inks is much thicker than the 
ink needed for almost all of the Epson inkjet heads. In addition to 
that, it looks like you would need to spend anywhere from about $600+ 
to provide a "soft" cure light source to the inks as they hit the 
paper, then another bunch of money for the final cure light source. 
It wasn't going to be cheap, but if it worked would have been great 
for something I wanted to try. Now it's back to contacting paper 
manufacturers looking for products that don't exist, and something 
that they can't see a market for...