Photo quality comparison: 3 vs 5 ink XP models

The L1300 does not print borderless anymore, the previous base unit B1100 did.

te36 said:

Am i overestimating the benefit of 1.5 pl ?

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Yes, I think so, I don't see a difference between the printout of a WF2010W which I have mentioned frequently in recent posts, I can compare to a R265 or R800 or L800. You can see slight differences with a magnifier in the coarseness of the dithering but that's all. But you may get some longer printout times when you set a office type (WF2010W) printer to high quality. It's a matter of the number of nozzles and the firmware defining the overprint cycles. And it's not just the droplet size being relevant, I'm getting a wider gamut - specifically in the darker areas - with the WF2010W than with the other printers mentioned - with the same inks. Please see some comments and tests here
https://www.printerknowledge.com/th...nters-be-used-for-photo-printing.10972/page-3

this is a direct comparison of target patch sheets, small crops of them , from a L800 with matte Photo setting and a WF2010W with matte fine setting, the patches are actually 6x7mm in the printouts, the gamut of the WF2010W is visibly wider for darker colors and is about 5% greater by volume overall, with the same dye inks.

So which patches are printed with the L800 - it's the top ones.
But the WF2010W takes more than twice the time - it is a pretty quick text printer but not tuned to print photos that quick.
It's the bottom left corner of this patch sheet

fascinating. thanks.

I can see the difference in dither resolution, but at that side you're probably right that it might be irrelevant when just looking at the results (without microscope etc.).

I i recognize the l800 patch, but i am not sure how to follow the conclusion of wider gammut. i do not understand how difference in actual hardware of a printer could change the gammut of th same paper/ink combination.

I could only see how a sucking printer driver or printer firmware could not create all possible dithered mixed color. If that dithering happens in the firmware and no driver can fix it, its kind of a hardware issue. Is that what you claim is a problem in the l800 ?

these patch prints are used to create an icm-profile, in this case with the i1Profiler software, and you then can take the profile and display it in a gamut viewer like Gamutvision or my old Monaco Profile viewer. Such viewers allow you to compare the gamuts, the color space of available colors with this device. You cannot draw any conclusions about the gamut directly from these prints but only inspect the profiles with a gamut viewer after profile generation.
The Gamut is a 3D body of available colors in the Lab color space, the borders show you those colors with the max. saturation you can get at a particular lightness. And you typically do a 2D cut through the gamut - in lots of cases at the mid lightness of L=50(%) where the gamut is at its widest. But gamuts of printers don't just differ there, you find wider differences at lower , darker lightness levels, where a printer either prints about everything into a dark muddy tinted gray or separates darker colors to still let you see details. And that's the case here with the L800 and WF2010W gamuts - the WF2010W gives you more differentiated colors and details than the L800, here is a display of the gamut variances at my posting #10 https://www.printerknowledge.com/threads/profiling-and-such-some-observations.11687/#post-98989
The scans of the prints above show you the differences how a printer, the firmware, the driver prints a particular color input value (RGB) onto a particular paper as selected, in this case matte papers, and that's something you cannot influence or control at all, that's the secret sauce of the driver/firmware. You have some controls - you can select a different paper type assuming that Canon/Epson tune the driver/firmware for optimal output on such paper. But actually no - selecting a matte paper type for a glossy paper gives you a wider gamut than with a glossy paper setting. And there is another variable you can control via the driver - some quality level settings like photo, optimal photo or fine, extra fine etc.
This changes the way the firmware places the droplets, the size of the droplets from 1.5pl to xx pl in connection with the number of print overpasses the head is doing together with the paper movement.
The dithering may look finer with a higher quality setting but the print takes longer. And does it have an impact onto the gamut - e.g. more saturated colors from more overpasses - yes or no, there is no general rule for that, it depends on the paper as well how much ink it can take. And you even get into the situation that more ink results in a smaller gamut - less color saturation for more ink.
So it's all these little intricate details which influence the final outcome.
But back to starting question - how relevant is the difference between a 1.5pl or a 3pl printer - can you really see it ?
This does not cover any other detail of a printer whether it's more er less suitable for photo prints - like paper handling - borderless option, connectivity, volume of ink cartridges , print speed and more.
So I'm using the L800 very much - e.g. I can start a print job with 30 sheets double sided - get back after one hour, turn the paper stack and it finishes the print job, just impossible with ongoing handling on a WF2010W or alike , ink refilling, sorting out half printed sheets when the ink level drops to Zero etc. So it's more than those little pixels making up a good usable photo printer.

thanks for the explanation. Can you think of any reason other than badly written driver/firmware why the gammut would be worse on a printer like the l800 than on the much cheaper wf2010w ?

In '88 i built a color printer driver as an exercise in university and vividly remember that the colors didn't print out as they should because i hadn't used a dithering algorithm that took pixel overprint into account (and similar issues). Maybe this is similar. Epson may have optimized their driver/firmware a long time for 3 pl and not tried to optimize for 1.5 pl later on equally well. And in result, gammut even deteriorated.

Have you benn able to compare behavior for different drivers ? Windows, Mac, Gutenprint/Turboprint (Linux) ?

te36 said:

Have you benn able to compare behavior for different drivers ? Windows, Mac, Gutenprint/Turboprint (Linux) ?

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No, I'm running on Windows only, I used a RIP for the Pro 7600 for awhile which did some things differently - dithering and such but otherwise I'm not familiar with the print output of any alternate driver.

te36 said:

Can you think of any reason other than badly written driver/firmware why the gammut would be worse on a printer like the l800 than on the much cheaper wf2010w ?

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I won't think it's badly written software, this type of printers is around since 15 years - R200 , 265 etc , such a product like the printer is a combination of some pretty good fine mechanical engineering and firmware in combination with marketing requirements/restrictions to differentiate products - just to mention that the WF-2010W can do borderless but the L300 using the same hardware/print engine cannot, same with the old B1100 and the L1300. The WF2010W is not supposed to be a good photo printer - selecting photo paper just let it run with 3 colors (with Durabrite inks which are not very good photo inks either) so I'm using the printer in a mode it is not intended to , and on top of that using other inks - like photo pigment inks or dye inks, the printer hardware can do more than the sales people are advertising. It's a kind of strange, typically advertising is promising much more than what you get at the end....
The WF2010W is sold as a document printer, some other Epson Expression Home model may use the same printhead, but with 4 dye colors, and using the black ink when printing on glossy paper, borderless, the L300 does the same , with dye inks, the same printhead as the WF2010W but running a different driver, and not borderless.... That's where marketing tries to differentiate products , and you are not supposed to know that a WF2010W can do more. You can make similar observations with other models.
And it could very well be that Epson inks on Epson papers in a L800 may run better with the glossy photo paper setting than with 3rd party material, I only did very limited tests like that because I won't use those materials for their pricing anyway.