The Monomagician

Or evenings, more like…The 3800 has been in place for six days and has had a fair amount of use by us both.  I saw my mate Phil Malpas at work this morning. He’s had a 3800 for almost a year and hasn’t had to change the inks yet.  He’s not exactly frugal with his printing either.  So it looks like it was the right decision from an economic perspective.

I cannot fault the image quality.  We’ve made prints on Epson Premium Glossy as well as Permajet’s Oyster 271 paper.  Both look great with colour and black and white images, but for me, the Permajet has the edge by virtue of its whiter base.  The Epson paper is positively creamy compared to the Permajet.

As I write this, I’m making my fourth A4 print on Permajet’s Classic Fine Art Fibre Base Gloss paper.  This is a 295gm² fibre-based paper.  The output is simply lovely.  I am chuffed to bits with the quality of the prints.  I want to try a couple fo the prints at A3 or even A2 if I can afford the paper.  It cost £1 per sheet at A4.  A pack of 25 sheets of A2 Classic Fine Art Fibre Base Gloss comes in at £94.95.  Not cheap, but in the immortal words of the Loreal adverts, I’m worth it!

To top it all, I even managed to take some pictures this lunchtime with my Canon G9, which I hope will have potential for my Picture a week project.

Less than twenty four hours after ordering an Epson Stylus Pro 3800 from Warehouse Express, I had a text message from Home suggesting that I might want to take the afternoon off work.  Sadly, I had to stay. Someone has to pay the bills…

When I finally got Home, there was a very large box in the hallway.  Our plan of campaign took shape over a cuppa and a carrot muffin.  First, empty the CIS ink tanks back into their original bottles, then make some space in the back bedroom, move the 2400 and then give the space where it had been a damned good dust.  I also took the opportunity to tidy up some of the cabling behind the PC and printer, which resembled an explosion in a spaghetti factory, with some curly cable tidying stuff that I had lying around.

Getting the box with the 3800 in it up the stairs wasn’t exactly difficult, but we were hindered by one rather inquisitive Samoyed with a penchant for cardboard packaging.  Moreover, having just had traction on my spine the day before, I had to be very careful not to undo the good work that my physio had done.  The right-angle bend at the top of the stairs added another slight challenge that was overcome with a little grunting and careful application of brute force.

Once the box with printer inside was in our study, there wasn’t much room for much else.  However, it only took a couple of minutes to get the printer out of the box and carefully heave it into position on the bench.

Once the printer was in position, it was time to power it up. After a few seconds of whirring, the door covering the ink tank bay opened.  The ink tanks are huge! They all required a good shake before being inserted into the printer.  Each one went in with a satisfying ‘click’.  When the door was closed, it was just a case of waiting about ten minutes while the printer charged the ink lines and went through whatever routines were necessary to set itself up.  Time for a spot of supper and a small beer!

So, supper finished and dishes in the dishwasher and it was time to connect the printer to the PC.  There was a bit of a hiccough when the Epson software said it could’t see the printer, but as Windows XP had detected it, I figured it was OK to continue.  When I went into the Printers and Faxes app on the Control panel, the printer was visible and I was able to run a test print from the Epson Stylus 3800 properties tab with no problem.

So, in total, I reckon it took about an hour, maybe an hour and a half to remove the 2400 from the study and install the 3800 in its place.  All that was left to do was fire up Lightroom and have a go at making some test prints.

The first print was a copy of this…

Port Quin, Cornwall

This was printed onto Epson’s Premium Glossy photo paper.  It looked stunning, even as a 9 x 6 print on A4 paper.  It was maybe a little dark, but that’s probably because I haven’t calibrated my monitor for a while.  I can’t wait to print it up on to A3 on Permajet’s Oyster 271 paper, which has a much whiter base than then Epson paper that I prefer.  It just looks cleaner to my eyes.

We decided to stop after five prints as it was getting late and I was a) thirsty and b) wanted to watch Thursday’s episode of “The Restaurant”.

OH HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN!

So, after much ummming and ahhing, we’ve made a decision that was rather surprising.  Someone on the Talkphotography forum responded to an enquiry about printers, suggesting I take a look at the Epson 3800 printer.  His rationale was that the ink cartridges hold 80ml rather than the rather paltry 12.5ml on the 2400 and 27ml in the HP B9180.  His logic was that the printer comes with £500 worth of ink, so it would pay for itself in next to no time.

So we did a few sums and based on an assumption that all of the printers consumed the same amount of ink per print, and knowing that we replenished inks on the 2400 say 6 times per year, we were able to roughly estimate the running costs.

They went something like this:

The discounted price is because Epson are doing a promotion at the moment, rewarding customer loyalty. So my tired old broken 2400 is worth £150! Fantastic!

I know I had said I was reluctant to go for another Epson printer due to the lack of user-replaceable parts, but, if the printer is reliable and lasts more than two to three years, then we’ll be quids in.  In fact with the discounted price, running the Epson 3800 would cost just 16p more than the cost of the HP B9180 and a year’s supply of ink.

There is also the added bonus that we can print up to A2+ with the 3800 (not that it’s likely to be used that often, but still, it’s added value!).

The line to Warehouse Express will be red hot tomorrow morning!

Having spent most of Sunday morning researching the printer market, I had narrowed my search down to the Canon PIXMA 9500 and the HP B9180. The cost of the inks though is enough to make your hair curl!  Using a CIS really does make you realise how expensive inks are.

Just before lunch I happened to log on to Ebay and did a quick search for ‘Epson 2400′.  There were a couple for sale, including one that had been refurbished, with a low starting price of £70.

After a brief discussion, we agreed that a refurbished printer would be a good way to get us going again and enable us to continue to use the CIS.  We set a limit of £150.  Sadly, someone else had much deeper pockets as it went for £195.  Never mind.  Looks like we’ll have to wait for our funds to grow a touch more.

There’s no way I will buy a new Epson printer.  So if we can’t get a replacement 2400 for a reasonable price, then I would prefer to get a new HP or Canon.

My Epson 2400 is still not cooperating.  In spite of my best efforts, the print heads won’t move from the parked position, so I can’t even get the CIS cartridges out to take it a repairer.

Talking of repairers, my local Epson Service centre refuse to even touch printers that have had a CIS fitted.

So, I’m now minded to just cut my losses and buy a new printer.  I have a bad feeling that it may be uneconomic to repair the 2400.  It looks increasingly likely that any new printer will NOT be an Epson.  I have heard that Canon and HP have made some serious inroads into Epson’s dominance of the market and I really do like the idea of user-replaceable print heads and automatic colour calibration (this is found on some HP models apparently).

The CIS will be rendered obsolete, but having said that it has paid for itself twice over in the year it’s been in operation.  I suspect I could easily sell it on Ebay and recover some costs that way.

Time to do some serious research and more importantly, lay the foundations with the keeper of the purse-strings!

Following on from my earlier printer woes, we decided to get hold of a cheap printer that would tide us over until the Epson 2400 is either repaired or replaced.  The 2400 was our only printer, so was used for printing not only photographs, but bank statements, letters, code listings and so on.

I wanted a printer that would work satisfactorily on WIndows XP and Linux (Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon and Hardy Heron).  After a quick trawl of what was out there that met our criteria for cheapness, it was on to the open printing site to see whether any of them worked with Linux.  According to the site, the ML-1640 “worked perfectly”.  A quick call to our local branch of Staples revealed a display model that was missing its box - they were willing to part with it for £59.99 - £10 off list price for something that would either languish in the loft or get flattened and put out for recycling.

The construction of the Samsung ML-1640 is quite flimsy, which given the price point isn’t really surprising. Anyway, within a few minutes of getting the machine home, I hooked it up to our Windows XP box and within a couple of minutes had printed my first test page.  The quality of the output was very good indeed, easily rivalling the quality obtained from (much) more expensive networked printers from the likes of HP and Kyocera.

On the subject of networking, I wanted to make sure it was possible to access the printer from any machine on our home network.  Since the Windows machine isn’t on all of the time, it wasn’t really feasible to use it as a print server.  I do however, have an old PC running Ubuntu (Gutsy Gibbon), which I use for testing new websites, file sharing, backups and as an IMAP server.  Since this machine is on for a good 16 hours a day, it made perfectly good sense to connect the printer to it.

I was not expecting the installation to be as straightforward as it was.  The OS detected the printer and loaded the right drivers in seconds.  A test print showed that everything was hunky dory, at least from the server itself.  Now, it was time to network the machine, so it was out with my copy of the Linux cookbook to make sure CUPS was set up correctly.  I was able to connect from my Ubuntu workstation and laptop in seconds.  This was all going too well!

Now all that was left was the Windows PC that I had previously used for testing the printer and an old Dell laptop.  Both machines are running XP (professional and home edition respectively).  I originally thought it would be necessary to make some changes to my Samba configuration.  However, no matter what I tried, I couldn’t make the printer appear in the Network Neighbourhood.  A quick google and I had the answer at my finger tips.  In the end, it wasn’t necessary to use Samba.  I used HTTP!  The add printer dialogue gives you the option of using a URL which goes something like
http://hostname:631/printers/<printername>

Full details of how to do this can be found here. So no need to mess around with Samba!

Everything works absolutely brilliantly - the only other thing I had to do was to load the printer drivers on to the laptop, which was easily accomplished by means of a USB pen.

Following hot on the heels of the Leica M8.2 announced at Photokina last week, Leica have released a new version of firmware for the M8.  It’s a major release, as the release numbers have jumped from 1.201 to 2.00.  Upgrading is a bit scary, as once the firmware is loaded, there is no way of regressing the software version.  Fortunately, the upgrade went ahead without a hitch.

So what does this new firmware give the user?  Well, for starters, the camera now supports SDHC cards.  So, if I want I can use a 32Gbyte SD card.  I don’t because I’m quite happy with 2Gbyte cards - these contain up to 187 raw images.  That’s plenty of eggs in basket already in my view.  Presumably though, there will come a time when ALL SD cards will be SDHC, so it’s probably a good thing.

I assume the firmware has support for the new Noctilux, 21mm and 24mm Summiluxes and 24mm Elmar.  Again, not much use as I have no real use for the new high speed lenses and anyway I will ever to be able to afford them.  The new 24 Elmar may be worth a look though…

The other thing that the firmware offers is an auto ISO facility.  I did wonder about the value of this, but having used it a couple of times over the weekend, I can safely say it is a damned useful feature to have.  At one point today, we were walking though some trees with quite a thick, leafy canopy, so the lighting levels varied considerably.  It was very handy leaving the camera to its own devices, leaving me to  concentrate on focus and composition.

The Auto-ISO feature is selected from the main menu.  You can limit its scope by selecting a maximum shutter speed/ISO combination, or let the camera decide when to use it depending on the lens mounted on the camera (this assumes that all lenses are 6-bit coded).

One unpublished feature I have noticed with the new firmware is improved metering accuracy.  Many M8 users, including me, regularly dial in 2/3 of a stop exposure compensation when using the ‘A’ mode in order to prevent skies or other highlights clipping.  Since having version 2.00 in the camera, the metering seems to be more accurate.  I’m not the only one to notice this.  Other users on the Leica User Forum have noticed it too.

Other users have reported improvements with image noise at higher ISOs, but I’ll have to reserve judgement on that one.

So, all in all, it was worthwhile making the upgrade.  I wish the new firmware allowed exposure to be dialled in in the same was as on the M8.2, where the user can apply first pressure on the shutter release and then dial in compensation using the thumbwheel on the back of the camera.  On the M8, it’s necessary to go into the menus to do this.

I loved my Epson 2400 printer and Permajet CIS until a few months ago when the image quality started to take a bit of a nosedive.  I think the reason was that we had gone away on holiday and left the printer and all of the attendant PC hardware switched off for two weeks. Consequently the ink in the printer heads may have dried out.  Now it won’t give a decent nozzle pattern and in spite of having followed the instructions on the Permajet website on how to deal with this problem, I have reached the conclusion that some of the nozzles are completely blocked.

So, with much trepidation, I decided to buy a nozzle cleaning kit from Permajet.  It arrived a couple of weeks ago and once holidays to Cornwall were out of the way, it was time to stop procrastinating and clean the printer.  Not least because both Karin and I have loads of shots that we want to print.

The cleaning kit comprises eight cartridges, chipped as if they are epson cartridges.  They have to be filled with cleaning fluid, which is first diluted 1:9 with de-ionised water.

So, with the easy part out of the way, it was time to remove the CIS - a fiddly and potentially messy task, before installing the cartridges.

Everything went well until I switched the printer on and I had three lights indicating problems with the black, cyan and light magenta cartridges.  Reseating the cartridges solved the problem with the black and cyan cartridges, but the light magenta refused to play.

I checked the printer status monitor and had a message telling me the light magenta cartridge was not recognised by the printer.  Curses!  Several attempts at reseating the cartridge or switching the printer off and back on made no difference.

My only option was to ring Permajet.  The chap was very helpful: apparently, bad chips are quite common, even with genuine Epson cartridges. The good news was that they would send me a replacement cartridge in the post.  The bad news was they had none in stock and they were on back order though he would check with the warehouse to see if there were any odd cartridges that didn’t appear on the system.

A week later and no cleaning cartridge.  So I rang Permajet again.  A cartridge arrived in the post the next day.  Thankfully, the cartridge was recognised when I installed it.

I left the printer overnight before printing out several pages of a purging file.  The idea was to wash the system through with the cleaning solution before reinstalling the CIS.

Imagine my frustration when, on reinstalling the CIS, there appeared to be little improvement.  Leaving the printer overnight did result in an improved nozzle pattern.  Then, to add insult to injury, the printer locked up, giving an error message telling me that some components had ‘reached the end of their service life’.

So, next week, the printer will have the CIS removed AGAIN and I’ll take it to a local place that can service the bloody thing for me.  Hopefully, it won’t be too expensive.