Fine-Art Printer of the Year: Epson Stylus Pro 11880
We're never satisfied. No sooner does a new piece of photo equipment come to market than someone asks, What's coming next? That someone is usually us, and occasionally we get hints of what's next from a high-end model that a manufacturer brings out to test the waters, to prove a new technology, or to give that technology a head start on the path to economies of scale that will make it more affordable to build and buy.
Those reasons drove the release of the Epson Stylus Pro 11880, and also explain why we've chosen it as our Fine-Art Printer of the Year. With a $13,500 price tag and a 64-inch roll-paper capability, the SP11880 is unlikely to find a home except with well-funded photographers who want to make very large prints. But we think this highly innovative pigment-based inkjet printer deserves recognition as a harbinger of things to come.
First things first, the SP11880 has a nine-channel printhead, and therefore does not require the user to manually remove and reinstall photo black and matte black ink cartridges when switching from glossy to matte paper and back. While HP and Canon both have introduced pigment-ink photo printers with 'simultaneous' blacks, until now Epson had only one such model, the 17-inch Stylus Pro 3800. Of course the original 1000-series Stylus Pro models could switch blacks on the fly, but they didn't have to accommodate the extra gray that makes the newer Epson models better monochrome printers.
The SP11880 is very fast, but its speed doesn't sacrifice resolution or the accuracy with which it sizes and places ink dots. The new print head features 360 nozzles-per-inch (3,240 total) and produces 3.5-picoliter droplets -- adding up to images of unparalleled resolution. Combine this with new dithering algorithms and Epson's K3 pigment inkset, which incorporates a Vivid Magenta to expand its color gamut, and it's fair to say the SP11880's image quality is the best yet from any inkjet printer. There's also good news for photographers whose vocabulary gets more colorful when their printer's heads clog: The SP11880 automatically checks and cleans its heads as needed. When a clog is detected the printer will clean itself -- even pausing to do so in the middle of making a print.
At a Glance: Epson Stylus Pro 11880
|
• 9 INKS/PIGMENT-BASED
• 64-INCH PAPER WIDTH
• 700ml CARTRIDGES
• ABOUT $13,500
• This top-of-the-line model represents the state of the printing art. Its nine-channel ink system, which incorporates a new 'Vivid Magenta,' lets you switch from matte to glossy on the fly -- and should be coming soon to a printer near your price range.
|
|
