Recommend high volume photo printing on inkjet

The R3000 sounds pretty promising. 9 pigment colours including 4 monochrome, paper rolls and reasonably priced. I could almost get 3 for the price of one 4900 which should make up for the slower speeds. Big question is ink supply. It takes 26ml cartridges but are there good non-OEM inks and are they easy to refill or does a reliable CISS exist for it?

ullipops said:

I considered the Epson 4900 last year for the exact reasons you mentioned, I just read too many horror stories about print heads constantly clogging up and needing expensive replacements so I'm a bit nervous about that model. It seems a bit overkill with an A2 printer for the sizes I print (I really would like to avoid doing any cutting) but if they were reliable I could live with that any maybe buy two of them to run in parallel. Am I overly concerned about the 4900? I can see myself fighting with a dead print heads while thousands of files need to get printed done pronto...

The Epson 1400/1500W/L800 are all dye based which I would like to avoid and they also have just 6 colours which I feel would influence b&w quality, so not ideal either.

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I use a 4900, 7900 and 9890 daily, and sometimes have them printing from early morning till the evening, with no major issues so far.
They do clog a little more compared to the older models, but this isn't really a concern, especially since you will be refilling.

I ended doing all my work with inkjets these days, even the 4x6s, believe it or not.

I'll have to disagree with cls though, going with more P50s instead of with a 4900 is not the wise thing to do IMHO.
The P50 is a low volume printer, whereas the 4900/7900 were designed for heavy continuous use. Going with 5x P50s instead of a 4900 is only going to lead to 5x the problems of 1 dye printer running on a pigment CISS (clogs will still be an issue, air in the tubes issues, the constant cleaning required every few hundred prints of the parking mats inside the printer, and so on). Whereas with a 7900 you simply refill and print, that simple, nothing else to worry about.

I'll also disagree about the speed; yes, a P50 can print an A4 faster than the 4900, but you might as well print 8 A4s on roll paper at a third of the time it would take the P50 to print 8 of them one by one.

ullipops said:

The R3000 sounds pretty promising. 9 pigment colours including 4 monochrome, paper rolls and reasonably priced. I could almost get 3 for the price of one 4900 which should make up for the slower speeds. Big question is ink supply. It takes 26ml cartridges but are there good non-OEM inks and are they easy to refill or does a reliable CISS exist for it?

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I have an R3000 as well, and it's significantly slower, and also much more time consuming to refill. Assuming you only print black and whites with a 70% coverage, you'd more or less require refilling the Light Blacks once every 30-40 8x10s. If this is something you can live with, then fine, go for an R3000. But imagine having to print 2000 pages, then you'd have to refill 70 times, just the one colour, before you were done

costadinos said:

... whereas it would probably take a couple of weeks with the 9500, not taking into account the time it takes to refill every 20 or so sheets.

palombian said:

Agree on this

But it doesn't clog

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It’s also rugged and reliable and it will take 30 photo sheets easy, and you’ll be amazed how easy it is to refill, it’s not the speed of a printer that counts its how much down time it takes with maintenance.

There’s another thing that has to be taken into consideration also and that is paper size, you’d be better off using exact size paper with no trimming off the excess bits later, it would save you years of time.

Lidl and Aldi do high quality photo paper in various sizes for little or nothing so you should watch out for their promotions in your area..

The Hat said:

There’s another thing that has to be taken into consideration also and that is paper size, you’d be better off using exact size paper with no trimming off the excess bits later, it would save you years of time.

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Um, not really. I, for example, produce the 4x6s by printing on 17" rolls, 17x25 page size, with the x900 printers. I use a 4x4 grid with 4.05x6.05 cells. I then trim all the pages at once with a stack cutter (guillotine), and end up with 4x6 borderless prints. Size and positioning is pretty accurate and consistent from page to page with the Pro Models, so trimming is not really an issue with a quality cutter.
You could do that with any print size and take advantage of the really fast speeds when using roll paper with an LFP. And with no downtime whatsoever for maintenance, refilling etc.
The same should hold true with the Canon LFPs.

As for the clogging, yes, it happens, but not all the time as most people think, and certainly not every 20 pages. All three of the models I have clog on average once every 2 days, one or two colours, a couple of missing nozzles each. There's occasionally a whole channel going missing in the middle of a print, but nothing that doesn't resolve after a cleaning. I am definitely wasting much less ink cleaning the large printers than either the R3000, R2000, P50 or 1400 I also use...It's not unusual for any of the large ones to go through 3 or 4 rolls of paper continuously with no issues and no breaks whatsoever...

These are the exactly the kind of answers I needed, you guys have already saved me a tonne of money, time and frustration. This forum is awesome!

Costadinos it sounds like you got it pretty much pinned I will look into cutting but I still have this nagging feeling that I wont be able to get it dead accurate or looking professional. Clogging that can be fixed with a cleaning cycle is not really a problem, I just heard horror stories about people having to buy brand new heads costing almost the same as the printer on a one year old printer. It sounds like the 4900 is a potential solution after all or maybe the 7900. What would you choose? Can any of them do any auto cutting? How about printing on sheet paper, I guess I would still have the problem of the paper holder being too small and having to be refilled constantly.

TheHat, now I have the pro9500 I will definitely test it properly and see how it fares! Thanks for the heads up on Lidl and Aldi, I will check them out for sure.

ullipops said:

These are the exactly the kind of answers I needed, you guys have already saved me a tonne of money, time and frustration. This forum is awesome!

Costadinos it sounds like you got it pretty much pinned I will look into cutting but I still have this nagging feeling that I wont be able to get it dead accurate or looking professional. Clogging that can be fixed with a cleaning cycle is not really a problem, I just heard horror stories about people having to buy brand new heads costing almost the same as the printer on a one year old printer. It sounds like the 4900 is a potential solution after all or maybe the 7900. What would you choose? Can any of them do any auto cutting? How about printing on sheet paper, I guess I would still have the problem of the paper holder being too small and having to be refilled constantly.

TheHat, now I have the pro9500 I will definitely test it properly and see how it fares! Thanks for the heads up on Lidl and Aldi, I will check them out for sure.

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Only the 4900 can handle more than one sheets at a time, and that not very efficiently. For the 7900/9900, you have to load each sheet individually before printing. Those printers were designed for roll use, not for sheets, and that's where they excel.
12" rolls are widely available, and all three of the printers have an automatic cutter, so you could print individual 12x10" prints, albeit not borderless. There will be a few milimeters of border around, but that shouldn't be an issue for that size.
Another solution, if you must print 10" on the long side, would be to buy paper that is used in the dry minilabs. I've tried the one from Fuji, it comes in 6", 10" and 12" widths and is pigment compatible, so you could use it with a 4900 to directly print and cut 7x10" prints. But bear in mind this will slow down the process significantly. These printers spend a lot of time between prints, while performing alignment, skew check and other stuff. Once it starts printing it's the fastest printer available though. The 4900 takes about 6 minutes for a 17x24" and about a minute and a half between prints.

cls said:

I have no near field experience with the X900 Series
but I have accomplieshed many high yield task with "small" desktop printers from epson with little efford
the machines are really cheap to replace
if ONE 4900 shuts down due to any malfunction you basically have no backup
if one of n desktop size printer shuts down you can still proceed.

I had the Pro 4000 and the Pro 4800 in my workshop and did print OVER 24 Liters of ink with booth machines within 6 month, i printed day and night all kinds of jobs and it was really easy to maintain both machines.

Later I sold the Pro 4000 to namibia and the 4800 to a client in austria

used 4900 either with the clogging issue or other malfunction I could buy even for 100€ in germany
i looked for some ended auctions
http://www.ebay.de/itm/281468115529
http://www.ebay.de/itm/111475600543
http://www.ebay.de/itm/131276374450
http://www.ebay.de/itm/111440835871
http://www.ebay.de/itm/141380512263
http://www.ebay.de/itm/111409758265
http://www.ebay.de/itm/131276374450

basically ~1.000 and you could buy a used but good condition

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I'm leaning to believe that all these stories about malfunctioning 4900/7900s are a little bit exaggerated.
We most probably only hear about the problems, since almost nobody with a working machine is going to bother to share his positive experience online. And what's more, Epson probably sold a lot more of the newer models than ever before, so the number of failures would naturally increase.

I too had a very persistent clog once last year, and initially feared the printhead was dead (one colour was completely clogged), but a couple of visits from the technician later, coupled with a few priming cycles and several cleanings resolved the issue.
I've had the 7900 for a few years and it has gone through about 35 liters of ink since then.
About 20 liters went through the 4900 and as much through the 9890.
All three of them are still going strong.

On the other hand, I had an R2000 that died after about 5 liters and an R1900 before that about the same. Not to mention that after a few liters go through these small printers they become a mess inside and increasingly more difficult to clean. And of course there are parts that sooner or later will get saturated and can't be cheaply replaced.

Costadinos let's say that I got one or two 4900 printers and printed from rolls. Are you saying that it would be faster to print on wider paper and then cut than a slimmer paper normally used in a dry minilab due to the time between printing a new file?

cls, I don't quite get what you tried to say with the cheap defect 4900 printers..

Yes, it will be faster. But it all depends on the volume of work and the amount of time you have for completing it.
2000 8x10s should be able to be completed in 3 days with ONE 4900. Probably half that time with a 9890 printing on 44" paper and then trimming.
But either way, it would probably take more than that to have them sent to a commercial minilab anyway