epson stylus photo r3000 vs epson surecolor p600

#EPSON STYLUS PHOTO R3000 VS EPSON SURECOLOR P600 PRO#

That's $1.85 per 1 ml of ink, or $5.55 every time you change from matte printing to non-matte printing, even before you've started printing. An ink cartridge costs $48 on the Epson website and, like I said, it holds 25.9 mls of ink. Flushing uses 3 mls of ink to go from Matte Black to Photo Black, or 1 ml to go from Photo Black to Matte Black.

It's not the minutes we're worried about so much as the ink. For about three minutes, the P600 makes grunting and groaning noises, during which (we figure) it's flushing the Matte Black ink out of its lines and replacing it with the blacker Photo Black ink. One thing to keep in mind is that, like previous Epson printers, the P600 goes through a slightly cumbersome black ink-swap process, whenever you switch from printing on matte paper to a non-matte paper, such as a glossy paper. It's a subtle improvement, to be sure, but it was only ever a subtle problem in the first place. You have to be looking for it, and it's hard to say whether you'd notice it if you didn't have some other print as a reference, but it's visible to the eye.

We pulled out every matte paper and cotton paper photo we had on file from our tests of various Epson photo printers over the years, most notably the Stylus Photo R3000, reprinted them on the R600, and compared the blacks.Īnd, sure enough, the blacks are blacker and have a wider, richer set of tones. With the P600, not only has Epson improved the Photo Black ink to that industry-leading D-Max, it's also improved the D-Max of its Matte Blacks, and it's this that excited us the most and consumed most of our time testing the printer. Black inks on matte papers aren't as inky black as we want them to be. Even on high-end inkjet photo printers, they've always had a slightly milky, slightly less-than-black look to their blacks, to our eyes. While it's been many a year since we've been troubled by the Photo Black blacks of photos printed on gloss or semi-gloss (they're absolutely ink black), Matte Black blacks printed on papers such as Cold Press Bright or on cotton rag papers such as Velvet Fine Art have been another matter. The P600, like older Epson printers, has a three black (or K3) ink system, which uses Light Light Black, Light Black and either Matte Black or Photo Black depending on whether it's printing on matte paper or not, to achieve its subtle black tones. This is where that menu of papers fits in, especially the ones that sound like olive oils or have cotton in their ingredients. Velvet Fine Art paper: Velvet surface that delivers a wide colour gamut and a high D-Max on 100 per cent cotton fibre paper, which is suited to colour artwork.

#EPSON STYLUS PHOTO R3000 VS EPSON SURECOLOR P600 PRO#

It's not quite a full-blown pro printer – it has relatively small, 25.9-millilitre ink cartridges, and only prints photos up to 13 inches wide – but it's quite high-end, and is the first in a new line of photo printers from Epson that soon will be expanded to bigger, fully professional models such as the 80-ml-per-cartridge, 17-inch P800.Īnother thing to know is that, according to Epson, the P600 can print the blackest blacks (or, in technical terms, the highest D-Max blacks) of any inkjet photo printer on the market.

One is that it costs $1500, meaning it's for people who are serious about printing their photographs. There are a few things you need to know about the SureColor P600.

Epson stylus photo r3000 vs epson surecolor p600