FWIW, I always use the top printing quality settings. It very often makes a difference.
In the Epson driver the paper type sets the ink load, among other things. Plain paper uses a low ink load. The premium matte and glossy paper types use more ink. One of the first things I do when setting up an Epson driver workflow is to see which paper type setting gives me the best dmax for a non-Epson paper of interest.
And for a given paper type, the quality setting also appears to affect the amount of ink and dmax. I suspect RPM uses the most and has the smallest drop size among the quality settings, although I don't know the details of the various settings.
With the k3 printers, if the 3880 is typical, the ABW mode printing may have the highest dmax and give the highest quality for the Epson driver -- even with a dedicated B&W inkset (assuming it's Epson driver compatible).
Paul
On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 12:22 PM, homershannon@... [DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint] <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
Well, it's a mystery. I got to thinking about Richard's comment on high speed and began to wonder if using the plain paper setting was causing unreliable results - even though the banding was occurring with the setting on Ultra Premium Matte paper. I ran a purge page using real matte paper and the appropriate setting, high speed off. It was perfect. I then printed an 8x10 of my image and it was very good but not perfect. I up-rezzed the image to 720dpi (for the print size) and printed it with the Photo RPM setting on and high speed off. The result was a perfect image.
I normally re-size my images for the correct printing size at 360dpi before printing. The up-rezzing to 720 is a new twist. Just to confuse me further, today I was printing a color image on my Epson 1430. When I had the image just right, using a 5.5x8.5 matte sheet to proof with, I printed a 17x10 image. The final print was all washed out. I messed around and wound up with three wasted full size prints - all washed out. I then re-sized the image to 17x10@720 and printed it with Photo RPM set. Bingo! Perfect image. I've never seen this happen before and I confess that I do not understand the results I am getting.