Hi All....
My wife and I shoot Preschool pictures for a living. We produce the pictures in-house on our own equipment. We prefer to use pigmented ink to produce the pictures since it will last a lot longer than dye ink. Over the years we have tried using several different models of Epson printers (R2400, R2880, etc_) and even tried to use the Canon 9500- Mark II Pro. All the printers work nice with their original, factory, ink cartridges. But, WOW... are those ever expensive!! I have long preferred to use a continuous flow ink delivery system, since the bulk ink for those systems is a LOT cheaper.. The problem has always been getting the printer to deliver what we see on our monitor screen. We have always printed from Photoshop. The bulk ink was cheap, but color quality has always been a problem.
Recently we tried to use an Epson Workforce 30 printer... with a continuous flow system and bulk, 3rd party, ink. The color quality that we were getting was far from what we wanted.
I accidently stumbled upon this web site a few weeks ago and decided to take a chance and ordered the $79 Photo Prism package. The package arrived today and I started immediately to follow the instructions to get my little Workforce 30 profiled. The Workforce 30 only uses 4 colors... black, cyan, magenta and yellow. I had some serious doubts if such a simple, 4-color, printer would be good enough for professional work.
I was wrong!! It took about 2 hours to slowly go through the directions and perform the profilling steps. But, when it was all done, that simple little printer is now delivering the best color quality that we have ever produced!! The results are FANTASTIC!!!
The printer is only an 8.5 x 11" machine, but our customers never want anything larger. Yes, I would have liked to have bought a 6-color pigmented machine, but Epson doesn't make such a printer. I had previously thought that a 4-color machine couldn't deliver an acceptable color quality. I was wrong. With proper profiling and following the directions I now have a SUPER QUALITY printer!!! I use bulk pigmented ink that costs about 10% of what factory cartridges would cost. I have hooked up an external waste-ink collection bottle to the printer. That way when the waste-ink counter thinks the waste ink pads are full, all I have to do is go to the Epson web site and download a FREE Epson utility to reset the counter for FREE... and keep right on printing. There is NEVER any waste ink in the waste ink pads. And the reset utility is FREE directly from a "secret" web page on the Epson web site. If anyone wants the page address, send me an private Email and I'll send it to you. It's good for all Epson printers.
If anyone wants the web address of the continuous ink flow system or the bulk pigmented ink... just send me a private Email and I'll share the information with you.
Again, thanks to Mike for a SUPER profiling utility!!! It WORKS!! It WORKS!!! It WORKS!!! Thank you. Thank You. Thank you!!!!
Best regards, and Thank you, Mike...
Darryl N.