I’ve been using the Epson C88 printers for many years - actually started with a C84, when the printer with ink from Epson was cheaper than a set of ink from Epson. They’re now up a bit over $100, but I still use ‘em with the MIS EZ ink set of 1 black (you have to pick matte or glossy) and three LKs which are all the same and work on both surfaces. The LK ink comes in neutral and warm, and you can vary the place on the neutral-warm continuum by which one you put in each of the color positions and by which paper you select.
I think they put out nice prints, but I use mine heavily in November and December (500-1000 8x10 prints) and rarely throughout the rest of the year, and so have fairly regular challenges with clogged heads. When they are running during my year end production they are usually clog free. But since I have a deadline for my printing (I make picture books for about a dozen family members as Christmas gifts) I have two of the C88s set up with the EZ inks, and a third one running OEM color inks for the occasional color print, but ready to take the EZ inks immediately should one of the B&W printers crap out.
I have not found them to be long-term durable in my usage. I don’t usually get more than about 1000 prints out of one before it gets an unbreakable clog. At their current price it works out to about 10 cents per print for the printer hardware, which I find acceptable for my purposes. Perhaps they would run longer if I ran them more consistently. But they are cheap enough to allow me to have a backup and a spare, something I could not do with larger printers from either a cost or space standpoint.
Mine will feed 4x6 reliably, but I don’t know about anything smaller. I send 5x7 Christmas cards, but print 2 on a letter size page and trim ‘em out. (If you are on a PC I cannot recommend QImage strongly enough as a way to place one or more images precisely on a single sheet - I can’t find anything for the Mac that can match its capabilities, which is why I run these printers from an old XP laptop.) My experience is that they do not always print perfectly square on a page. This is noticeable in my Christmas prints which are done with a 1/4 inch margin, where I can see that the margin is not exactly the same width for the full length of the long side. (Family members never seem to notice, and my wife just tells me not to look, but it still bugs me. I do make a set of prints each year that have 1 inch borders, and you can’t see the problem there. And different printers have different amounts of skew in their output. It’s what you get with a product that’s built to a price.
You can still buy the C88 from Epson on its Closeout page, but I understand they do not have drivers for it for Win 7 or 8 and don’t plan to offer any. I haven’t tried the printers on my Mac, but gather there is a similar driver problem.
If I win the lottery I’ll buy a bigger house, put in a bigger “darkroom” for my printers, get one of the big Epson or Canon printers with a lot of black/gray inks as well as color, and just the pay the thousands of dollars a gallon for OEM inks. Until then, I’ll put up with the quirks of the C88s as long as I can get them and the EZ inks.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Kip
On Feb 16, 2014, at 9:33, Sanders McNew <
sanders@...> wrote:
Forgive another elementary question:
What are the better options for making smaller B+W prints, no larger than 8.5 x 11 inches, and more likely from 3x3 to 5x5 inches? Is there a reliable small-carriage printer that does the job? Any that makes decent prints from OEM inksets? I remember when I was active on the list 10 years ago that there was an inexpensive Epson printer that Paul Roark (I think) had fitted with a B+W inkset, that did good work, but the printer itself was rather dodgy.
My wife (also a photographer) shoots in color and B+W, so I might not have the ability to use a B+W inkset for the printer. Or maybe we could get a big machine and run it with OEM inks, and I could get a small printer and dedicate it to B+W printing.
It seems like a waste to spend a thousand bucks on a big printer from Epson or Canon when we're rarely going to be printing larger sizes.
Thoughts?