Am I defecting to Canon ?

[Ink stained Fingers]

I'm getting the first refill parts for the T2100 delivered by Aliexpress, the T2100 is scheduled for delivery end of the coming week.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

My Epson SC-T2100 arrived, I got it installed pretty easy, it is printing with the setup cartridges as delivered, I'll go and profile my roll papers in the next time. The printer does not do much internal activities between commands, it is much more responsive than the Canon printer.
The printer - as the image shows - has the display at the top at the left side - much better than on the Canon TC-20 at the left front, and the Canon display is much smaller. I can turn the printer and roll it under the table when not in use.

 

[The Hat]

My Epson SC-T2100 arrived, I got it installed pretty easy,

I hope you have better luck with this one…..

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I hope you have better luck with this one…..

the print quality of the Canon TC-20 is good - very good for a 4 color printer, I tested lots of driver settings and profiled several papers, that all went very well - with roll paper or via the sheet feeder, there is no point at all I would critique, it's the user interface I didn't get along with - aside from the front panel at the wrong location which is not a Canon problem directly - it should be at least movable upwards. The printer keeps itself busy for minutes with some internal noise - ssswwwrwrwrklonkwwwsssss and you don't know whether you should wait or push a button or get a coffee, and the printer then tells you that the paper is skewed, and you start all over again - and get notice that the paper is running out - it was not at that point of time - or that the leading paper edge is uneven and waits for input to cut it but then tells you that the actual paper width does not match with the display data, and you can start printing after 15 minutes once all those issues are resolved. It was impressive what all could go wrong before I could make the first print. That all was missing with the setup of the Epson T2100, there are no 3 minute waiting intervals for changing a paper roll - just 3 minutes if everything would go fine or take even longer - the Epson printer is ready after 15 seconds for a similar action. The user menu via the display is very deep as well - I printed 2 pages of the menu structure from the service manual - the text in the little boxes is too small to read. I printed the menu layout on 2 A3 sheets - you could read the text in the boxes with a magnifier - I printed the menu on 2 sheets A2 and only then the fineprint becomes readable. The T2100 has a similar wide range of options and settings as the Canon printer which you can access in the user menu - for parameters and properties you need to know about that they even exist. There is not much of a difference in this point beween Epson and Canon. These printers are primarily made for a production environment where you need those parameters. But the T2100 does not require a private user to do a full network connection setup and security settings - incl root sertificate installation and more - you can work very well via a USB connection.
The print quality appears to be very good as well after the first prints - as good or even slightly better than with the Canon TC-20. My old P7600 was running with light inks and a droplet size of 4pl, a very slight granularity in monocrhome areas was visible but it looks much better with the T2100 which runs just with 4 color inks and 4pl droplet size as well. It is impressive to see that you get really good print quality with both of the 24" printers for just about 800€.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I got familiar with the handling of the T2100 - driver settings - inks - paper loading etc. I can say that the T2100 comes over as easier - simpler to handle than the Canon TC-20 , the T2100 does much less internal activity than the TC-20 , and the use of the user panel on the top is much better for me than the small TC-20 display at the front. Both the TC-20 and the T2100 create very good print quality, this would make it somewhat difficult for me to prefer one model over the other based on print quality, but the user experience with the T2100 is much better for me than on the TC-20 , the T2100 leads by far over the TC-20.
But I'm not going to use the printer for advertising posters or architectural and construction drawings but much more for printing photos - which Epson explicitly tries to prevent - the word "photo" does not exist anywhere in any product descriptions , user manual etc. But I want to print photos regardless - it's a 4 color printer with a black ink used on normal and matte papers - not for glossy papers, prints on glossy papers are done just with the CMY 3 colors which is typical for Epson, and my old WF-2010W was already running like this.
The T2100 runs on cartridges, but there is a problem - refill is made difficult by Epson - refill cartidges exist but the chips are on-time chips similar to the P900, chips need to be changed everytime a cartridge runs empty , Epson is storing cartridge serial numbers in the printer to prevent its re-use after a possible reset. Cartridges come in 2 sizes - the CMY cartridges as 26 or 50 ml, black as 50 or 80ml. And parts from China - Aliexpress - are complicating the situation - refill cartridges are small and only take about 20 ml, but the chips count down as for a 50 ml cartridge, that's nice so it takes longer for the count down but you need to check the ink levels once in a while and do an interim refill - that's possible but not very convenient. And chips are pretty expensive. I could run a T3100X instead as an Ecotank model, but at a price which runs at 2.5 x of the base price of the T2100/t3100N, and an Ecotank model makes it difficult to swap inks easily.

Epson 4 color printers suffer from the problem that the black pigment ink is used only on matte papers and not in a glossy paper mode which takes away much of the gamut at the lower luminance levels - there are no details in
the darker image regions. I have already shown years ago that there is a way around that limitation - by using a black ink for glossy photo papers. Such ink prints as well on matte papers but the gain in the gamut on glossy papers is much larger than the small loss on matte papers. So I'm using a photo black ink instead but use the enhanced matte driver setting with this result

This directly shows the gamut gain at the lower luminance levels - at the low end - the gamut is the same at luminance levels above 25 - the yellow gamut body is just a line width wider at luminance levels above 25 , the darkest point is at about 22 whereas the dark gray tip reaches down to a black level of 10 in this case. And this is directly visible in prints with better definition of details in the darker regions.
I could fill a refill cartidge with a separate matte black ink if I wanted to which gives flexibility over an Ecotank printer. I still have plenty of left over ink from the P7600 which I used for a long time, I hope I can use up these inks over time, they don't give me the full gamut of the original Epson inks which came with the printer but I'm going to live with that limitation. If I really would want to get the most gamut with the OEM cartdidges I just would have to buy and insert them.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Both the Canon TC-20 and the Epson T2100/T3100 come with an autosheet feeder which let you use the T2100 as a desktop printer for papers in the A4 - A3 format, the sheet feeder holds about 50 sheets normal paper, it's less for thicker papers. Switching the paper source - roll paper or sheet feeder - is easily done via the driver and the paper source selection. So you can load and print multiple sheets of photopapers or whatever type with one print command. But borderless printing is not possible - Canon leaves an edge of 5mm, Epson does a 3 mm edge.
And there is still another option - to feed single sheets with any width via the regular paper path, and that does not do any cutting after the print job.
This let you do a small trick with stiff photopapers on a roll- specifically at the end of the roll - you print blank pages and let the printer cut the sheets to the intended format, you unroll the sheets - you roll them up the other way around on an empty roll and let it stay there for some time. You then take the sheets and feed them individually and they come out of the printer pretty flat after tlhis treatment.

The Canon TC-20 has another option on top of the sheet feeder - an A4 flatbed scanner which makes this model
quite a flexible office printer overall. Epson on the other side let you add a 24" scanner to our base printer to copy drawings and alike so you have a complete scanner/printer copy machine for 24" images, and this with a small footprint.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Both the Canon TC-20 and the Epson T2100 offer the selection of various papertypes - some well known to regular visitors or members in this forum like matte or glossy papers - but since these printers are targetted to architects and graphic ads designers there are more paper types listed in the driver - CAD drawings b/w or color and GIS drawings b/w and color - GIS = Geographic Information System - map data in essence. These papers in the highest quality setting support 1200 dpi printing whereas all other paper types are supported up to 600 dpi which is very typical for Canon and Epson printers at this time. The Qimage printing software displays the selected print resolution in the print properties which is pretty unique compared to other programs with a printing module which just may list quality levels to select.

I'm using the Roger Clark resolution test pattern

https://clarkvision.com/articles/printer-ppi/

at the bottom of this article.

This test pattern shows the effective resolution quite well - it is about 300dpi since 1pixel lines and spaces are
covered up by the dot gain of the droplets - lines widen, and this effective resolution does not change by increasing the document resolution from 600 dpi to 1200 dpi. Please keep in mind that these printers are 4-color printers with 4 pl droplets, and not photoprinters with 1.5 pl droplets.

This is a scan of the printouts of the R. Clark resolution pattern with an embedded resolution of 600 or 1200 dpi, there is no real gain with the 1200 dpi setting. Printing with such a high resolution increases the Windows spool file, but the actual prints are very small - smaller than stamp size - the 1200 dpi version just prints as a 11x6 mm image - the 600 dpi version as twice as large.

(I had to scale down the scanned image by 50% to match the forum software limits, scanned with 4800 dpi)

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I'm now using the Epson T2100 with refill since about 2 months and can report some peculiarities I didn't know when I got the printer. Both the Epson T2100 and the Canon TC-20 are part of a product family of entry level large format printers of the resp. company. As mentioned already the Epson T2100 is offered at about 800€, the same as the TC-20, the TC-20 is a Megatank printer, the T2100 runs on cartidges. An Ecotank version of the T3100 is offered as well at a much higher price - at about 2200€ which let you quickly look for refill options. I'm not familiar and have not tested the Canon TM-240 , a similar printer running on cartidges as well, this model with 5 pigment inks incl 2 blacks, the T2100 and the TC-20 both with 4 pigment inks. The Canon printer uses the pigment black ink as well for printing on glossy paper, it is a kind of universal ink for both matte and glossy papers. The Epson ET-2100 does not use the prigment with the driver setting on glossy paper which affects the effective dark point, the mix of the CMY colors is not as black as a real black ink. But since the ET-2100 runs on cartridges it is easily possible to use 2 different black inks - for matte and photo papers - and switch the cartridges as needed - and print with the matte paper setting in the driver onto glossy paper with a photo black ink - it makes a visible and measurable positive difference - and as well when you create an icc-profile.
The print quality of both models is very similar and good, the T2100 runs with 4 pl and the TC-20 with 5pl droplet size, monochrome areas are smooth, and some noise is only visible at very close distance. There are rather slight differences at close viewing distance but that would not be a reason to prefer one model over the other. All these printers are not marketed as photo printers, not at all when you browse through the marketing brochures, these printers do not print borderless. A limit is specified for the paper thickness - 0.27 mm for both printers, this does exclude any thicker fine art like and other heavier papers - a 250 gr highgloss photo paper works without problems.
The question about banner printing and the max. paper lenght comes up now and then - the Canon TC-20 prints banners up to 4 m, the Epson T2100 let you set the custom length to 91 meters (!)- that's about 2 rolls of paper. I don't know which graphics program can handle that and whether Windows could handle such a large spool file.
And there is another limit - the paper roll diameter cannot exceed 11 cm which limits the paper roll size and excludes paper on a 3" core. Or you unroll some of it onto a 2nd roll.
The inks for the TC-20 come in 70 ml bottles and are keyed so that you cannot fill them up in the wrong color tank, very easy and reliable. the TC-20 has ink sensors in the tanks, and the printer might send you an email whenever there is a problem with the inks running empty or the paper or else. That's part of the overall functional setup.
The Epson T2100, and the other similar models like the T3100 - T3170 in some countries - use cartridges T40Cx with 25 ml content for the CMY colors and 50 ml for black, or the T40Dx cartidges contain 50 ml for CMY and 80 ml for black. And this is starting to create problems. All cartidges have a chip counting down the remaining content, but there is no resetter on the market at Aliexpress nor ARC chips are available. You need one-time chips which are sold at pretty igh prices - about 10 - 12 € per chip per color.

https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005007703211841.html?spm=a2g0o.buyer-tracking.appTrackingRecommend.1.296e7df9tv5Ywj&gps-id=appTrackingRecommend&scm=1007.30509.402598.0&scm_id=1007.30509.402598.0&scm-url=1007.30509.402598.0&pvid=d1955345-286f-4a8a-bd50-0af662d649bf&_t=gps-id:appTrackingRecommend,scm-url:1007.30509.402598.0,pvid:d1955345-286f-4a8a-bd50-0af662d649bf,tpp_buckets:668#2846#8114#1999&pdp_npi=4@dis!EUR!15.39!15.39!!!16.29!16.29!@211b80c217293275595234259e8f61!12000041915502520!rec!DE!160539225!XZ

This is eating up all benefits of refilling this printer. You can get refill cartidges labelled as T40Dx to which you attach the chips but these cartridges only take 25 ml, but the chip counts down 50 ml. This requires you to refill the carts when the chip has counted down less than 50% so you need to monitor carfully the actual and the chip ink levels. You can buy compatible cartidges which are priced at about the price of that chip + an empty refill cart.
I tried to refill various carts - refill works with the original cartridges and replacing the chips, I had problems with the alternate carts - the ink outlet does not seem to be closed by the spring loaded valve as most Epson carts have, and I had some ink spill with such 3rd party carts. I'm refill doing now only with the OEM Epson carts. And before I forget it - both printers support printing onto single sheets - A4 or larger up to A3 - the paper bin takes about 20 - 30 sheets of plain paper or less of thicker photo papers. You just select the paper source via the driver. It just works fine. If you print photos onto glossy paper you might compare the gamut to other photo printers - the gamut of these 4 colors printers is smaller than the gamut of the 8 or 10 ink printers, but as long as you don't have a print available for comparison from such printer you don't get the feeeling that something is wrong with the printouts on the T2100 or TC-20. Keith Cooper has tested the TC-20 recently with an overall positive verdict

https://www.northlight-images.co.uk/canon-tc-20m-printer-review/

If you want to know more about these printers - just get the user manual - it's just about 500 pages for the T2100 + 200 pages for the network setup and operation - and about 1000 pages for the TC-20 incl. the network setup and operation. Everything, every option, every step is described in great detail.

 

[The Hat]

I'm now using the Epson T2100 with refill since about 2 months and can report some peculiarities I didn't know when I got the printer. Both the Epson T2100 and the Canon TC-20 are part of a product family of entry level large format printers of the resp. company

Thank you for your un-bios opinion on both of these printers, it won’t be easy for someone to make up their mind as to which one to get because they both have their pros and cons, but at least with you post it should make it a bit easier..

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I can add another piece of information - both the TC-20 and the T2100 and the companion models have a waste ink /maintenance box which is user replaceable - they are priced at about 35 - 40 € for the OEM part, you can get them at about 10 - 15€ via Aliexpress from China. I see cleaning cycles on the T2100 at every cartridge change and every power up if you switch down the printer completely. The Epson printer uses 4x800=3200 nozzles which is quite a lot for an Epson printer, the TC-20 prints with 4300 nozzles, and it should be obvious that every nozzle needs some ink during the cleaning action, so the maintenance box is a consumable item; I did not get any clogged nozzles so far.