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The EPSON Stylus Pro 3800 uses Epson's UltraChrome K3 pigment inks, the same inks as used by the R2400, Pro 4800, 7800 and 9800 printers. EPSON are modest with their claim for a 75 year print life, Wilhelm Research has a preliminary finding of 85 to 166 years under glass (depending on media used) and > 300 years in Album dark storage. You should be aware that the figures are only applicable when using EPSON's own media, third party media may have a much shorter life.
There are five colours, Cyan, Light Cyan, Magenta, Light Magenta and Yellow. and four blacks Photo Black (for glossy media), Matte Black (for matte media), Light Black and Light Light Black. This printer doesn't have a gloss optimiser, but the inks are claimed to be High gloss and therefore shouldn't need a gloss optimiser. Looking at some of my first prints I can confirm that the Gloss on the 3800 is much better than on the Epson SP2100/2200 prints, but not as glossy as the R1800 and R800 prints.
On Monday I was busy printing on a variety media types and print sizes including A2, the quality of colour from the Pro 3800 is without question, outstanding! I printed image after image without any tweaking and all the prints closely match the original images seen on my monitor. Not so long ago I spent hour after hour in a darkroom trying to produce a single acceptable 20 x 16 CibaChrome print, now I can produce eight exhibition quality A2 prints in less than an hour. The Pro 3800 has an excellent set of profiles for a variety of EPSON media, so unless you want to use third party media, I don't think you will need to create or buy a custom profile.
Of course the key to achieving perfect colour prints is to have your system fully colour managed and a good place to start is by profiling you monitor. The next step is to understand how to use the print command. In Photoshop use the File > Print with Preview.... You have several options on Photoshop's interface, but the important one is "Colour Handling". You can let the printer handle the colours or let Photoshop handle them. Even though both use the same profile (Pro38 PGPP), Photoshops managed colour has produced much richer colours. You must ensure when using Photoshop managed colours that you turn off the colour management in the printer driver to avoid applying two profiles to the print. The sample prints below show how the colour and overall quality are affected by both settings. The bottom image shows a print which has had two profiles applied.
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| Turn off printer colour management via Custom > Advanced - select Off (No Colour adjustment) |
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Be careful not to double profile when using
Let Photoshop Determine Colours
otherwise results like this may occur |
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