QTR-Quadtone RIP

I have two Epson 13" printers. The idea was too have a dedicated colour printer and a dedicated Quad tone printer. I have been using an Epson 1410 (1400in the US) as the Quad printer and a 2100 (2200 in the US) as the colour printer.

Both printers work and I have fitted both quad inks and colour inks in the 1400, but I have only colour ink for the 2100

I like the 2100 for its pigments inks. The driver lacks some of the paper profiles, the 1410 caters for more paper profiles.

So I have to buy more QuadTone inks. Has any got any compelling reasons for choosing one printer over the other?

Cheers

Greg

Hi Brian and thanks for your reply.

I had a 2000P which I could never get a decent colour print from except when using Epson Archival Matte. So If I can't get a decent colour print, I reasoned, that I should convert It to a B&W printer. That worked reasonably well until one of the colour tanks leaked badly and sent ink into the print carriage electronics. That was the end of that printer. The inks that I purchased for that were MIS UT4FSN-4-C,Y, M, K, LM, LC

I thought the second generation pigment printer ie. the 2100 would have to be better

It should have been better, except there was no canned colour profiles for the paper that I had, There is in the paper selection, Plain, Archival Matte, Premium Semigloss, Glossy Paper Photo Weight, Watercolor Paper. I had Archival Matte, Premium Glossy Photo Paper and Glossy Photo Paper. I could match the Archival Matte profile but where were the profiles for the other two.

At the same time I got a good deal on the 1410 and planned to use that for B&W printer. I used the inks that I got the 2000P in the 1410. That sort of worked, but I wondered I that ink was ok for it.

I needed to print some colour the other day, the 2100 wasn't working, so I put a new set of colour carts into the 1410 and it worked well, most of the paper profiles except for Glossy Photo Paper are there.

Now I have a working colour printer and a 2100 colour printer.

Back to the original question, which of the two colour printers to convert to B&W, preferably using the inks that I have.

Cheers

Note that Epson have a strange habit of changing the names of some of their papers. For example Archival Matte was renamed Enhanced Matte in the US, but not elsewhere, and has now been renamed Ultra Premium Presentation Paper Matte Paper (I think). I'd use Premium Glossy for regular Glossy, or you could pay someone to make just one profile. To use these profiles, you'd need to turn on colour management in the Epson driver and print from Photoshop or some other program that uses colour management.

If you can't get it working, and you want to have both a colour and a B&W printer, then I think you're going to need a new colour printer. I think the 1410 is the best option for a dedicated B&W inkset. It's one of the last printers that has carts on the print head, rather than ink lines and dampers, and so is easier to maintain. The 1410 seems to suffer far less from the issue of micro-banding in the first and last inch when printing with QTR that plagues most other desktop printers. So my advice is to keep it going for as long as you can as a B&W printer, try to resuscitate the 2100 for colour, and if you can't then buy something else.

Thanks again for your advice. I have seen that site for .icc profiles, but after you run the setup.exe within the zip file, where do the icc profiles goto. No idea.

Cheers

Greg

Which had the 2100 profiles. I downloaded and Installed them.

Of course the soft proofing is different between the 1420 and the 2100, but I'll have to wait till the computer shop gets the LC and LM carts into stock, then I'll print and see whether it approximates the proof.

Thanks again. I'll keep you up to date

Greg