Digital BW, The Print

Greetings to all from the land of Ouzo

At this point I've owned 2 each of the above printers: an R200, 
R220, and an R300 & R340. I had initially assumed when I went from 
the R300 to the R200 that since the mechanics were the same, the 
print quality would also be as good. I was dissapointed: the R300 
was flawless, the R200 banded right out of the box, and no amount of 
cleaning/alignment fixed it. I eventually ran it into the ground 
doing color proofs, and replaced it with a new R220. It was even 
worse, exhibiting a cyan registration problem so severe that it is 
useless even for color proofing. It will go back to Epson, with a 
hail of curses. Needing a color proofer in a hurry, I bought an R340 
on July 4th sale for $130, not too painfull. It printed beautifully, 
almost perfect on all channels, excellent BO, and good enough to 
separate out 4-5 channels for making banding free internegatives.

So: is this luck of the draw, or am I seeing a pattern? The R300 
series printers seem to be made in Phillipines (at least mine were) 
but the R200 printers were made in China. My suspicion is the QC 
and/or manufacturing standards of the Chinese printers is not equal 
to the Phillipine ones.  

Does anyone have any experiences to relate here? Any opinions?

Steven Karafyllakis

On dial-up from Greece-I miss my DSL!