Image detail

The eye close up pictures on page 3 seem to have left some readers in a quandary , looking at the samples they don't appear to be as sharp as the Canon or HP samples. This can be put down to the UltraChrome pigment ink which is a much thicker makeup than dye inks. I have run the same sample image through the printer several times. changing the quality setting on each run, lets see how this effects the image sharpness. All the scans are made with the Epson 4870 using Ed Hamrick's excellent VueScan software.

1. Photo	2. Best Photo
3. Best Photo RPM H/speed	4. Best Photo RPM H/speed off
Select settings in Basic mode (two options)	Or in Advanced mode (three options)

The above pictures were made using the following settings in the Epson printer driver:

1. Photo - 1440 dpi
2. Best Photo - 2880 dpi
3. Best Photo RPM - 5760 dpi using High Speed turned On (available in Advanced mode)
4. Best Photo RPM - 5760 dpi with High Speed turned Off (available in Advanced mode)

Looking at the above prints the optimum performance seems to be coming from the Best Photo setting, with a resolution of 2880 dpi. When viewed in the hand, the difference in the print quality is virtually indistinguishable, even when compared to the Canon prints. Given that this is the case, there would seem to be no real gain in using the higher dpi settings, unless of course you feel like splashing out on extra ink cartridges (higher settings will use up more ink). The Best Photo RPM setting (Resolution Performance Management) is a software driven resolution as opposed to true resolution.

Colour

The R1800 claims a better colour gamut than the R800, even though both printers use the same ink cartridges. The improvement is due to a software conversion engine that closely matches what you see on your screen to what you see on your prints. Images on a monitor are displayed in sRGB, whereas printed images are a result of the printer converting them into a smaller colour gamut - CMYK. This new colour conversion engine claims to raise the gamut utilisation for the R1800 to 98 percent of this printer’s color gamut, compared to approx 79% on the R800. Forget the nice graphics, I am going to see if this claim can be substantiated in actual prints.

As per all reviews I am using the cotton reel image. The reels were specially chosen to closely match the colours used in the Kodak Gray Scale (CAT 152 7654) kit, and they look more interesting too.

Original reels taken from test file

Epson R1800 reels printed on Premium Glossy Photo Paper

Epson R800 reels

Epson 2100 reels

Canon i9950 reels

The above samples show that the R1800 is accurate in reproducing almost all the colours with the exception of the yellow reel. I will try and improve on this with some other media and different profiles.

Next page - more colour. Don't forget to press your F5 key to refresh the pages.