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Setting up the printer was a very quick process, although I am slightly hesitant about not aligning the print heads, but following the instructions to the letter I am not advised to do this unless there is a problem with print quality. Who am I to question this advice.
I did print a Plain Paper test page via the printer Properties panel and set the printer paper settings to Plain Paper - Photo Black - the test page colours look good but the Blacks are very weak, setting the printing preferences to Matte Black produces a heavier black. At this stage I have discovered that the Photo Black and Matte Black inks are swapping. Each black ink is connected by a tube to a switching box. When you swap the inks via the driver, the ink between the switch and printhead is purged, this process wastes approx 1.5ml of ink. I must confess that I had thought that as the inks are fitted at the same time, we had seen the end of ink being wasted when changing between Photo & Matte blacks - dream on Vincent!
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Plain paper with Photo Black |
Plain paper with Matte Black |
The Stylus Pro 3800 is an A2 printer which means that your probably not going to use this printer for day to day A4 prints. However, to keep continuity in our reviews and for ease of scanning the prints, I will print our usual test file for this first prints page. Please feel free to use the test picture for your own personal use - just click on the first picture to download.. EPSON have supplied a variety of A2 media packs which I will use later in the review. For my first print I am using Epson Archival Matte Paper - I am using this because I flushed out the Photo Black for the Plain Paper test above and I don't want to waste the inks.
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Original |
First Print using Auto |
2nd Print using ICM |
The first print which was set to Automatic took 2 min 15 seconds, which is an impressive speed by any standards. This print is using Superfine 1440 dpi. and print speed set to high.
The first print is a touch on the light side, although looking at it without comparing it to another print , it looks very good. Detail is held throughout the entire image but the white cotton reel is right at the limit before becoming washed out. The black reel is showing good detail in the shadow area and is maintaining detail in all the threads. For the second print I set the Mode to Advanced and selected the ICM options (I will cover this later in the review). The second print has a better overall colour, although Sophie's skin tone is slightly heavy. The black reel threads have lost a lot of detail.
I will run the same print test this time using Premium Glossy paper, this involves changing the Matte Black to Photo Black, this changing process took 3 minutes 28 seconds.
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2nd Print (Archival Matte)
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3rd Print (Premium Glossy)
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The Premium Glossy Paper print looks spot on with good detail throughout the picture. The colours are vibrant, and a lot richer than the original file. The b/w image has picked up a strong hint of cyan, but bear in mind this will be a composite grey, I will put greyscale printing through a more subjective test later in this review.
I have included a few detail scans so you can compare the dot quality of the Pro 3800 next to some other popular printers, but bear in mind that this is an A2 printer and will produce much larger prints that all the others in the samples below.
I think the Pro 3800 is displaying remarkable detail on an A4 print, if this is carried over on to a full A2 size print then I am going to be very impressed.
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