" What It Says On The Tin "

My new favourite saying from Matt Ball to describe products that deliver every time. As I am determined to write more from experience than imagination in the future ( my imagination having given out after seeing the stuff they show at the cinema these days... ) I could look at the PhotoLive Expo 2022 trade tables with a clear eye. One of the clearest is that of Epson. I waited there and listened to a discussion between the two sides of the table re. the Epson SureColor P906 printer and could mentally nod agreement. I was even drawn so far as to offer my advice and experiences with my Epson printer and supplies. To their credit, no-one screamed or ran. The SureColor P902 is an A2+ printer with a 10-cartridge ink system. It will do cut sheet, boards, rolls, CD's and labels. The specs say it can do an astonishing 18-metre long print, which I cannot imagine. My R3000 will print roll material, if I can get it, but the computer program that commands it never seems to be able to do long panoramas. Nevertheless, it will print everything else that I can put into its little A3+ feed hopper. And the SureColor P902 should be all that much better - the ink cost would be less per ml than mine, and that equates to cheaper prints as such. However, you can obsess about this number too much and lead yourself away from success. I did that for some period of time until a lucky accident occurred; I let one section of the printer head clog up. My fault, of course - I just failed to exercise the printer enough over a period of months and something clagged up. It's a common failing with inkjet printers and needs a weekly 6 x 4 shirley run through the machine to keep the lines and head free-flowing. When I finally decide that it was DJD on the gloss ink, I wnet to get matte ink to carry on - and discovered the Epson Archival Matte papers in their own packaging. The serendipitous part of this is the computer, printer, ink, and paper are now operating on the correct in-built prrofile and I do not need to continuously change parameters when I start to print. I can go with Epson Archival matte in a number of surfaces or treatments and the machines react to each other correctly. A Big Box 'O Paper is somewhat expensive, but I can be sure of 25 prints out of the package of 25. No weird colours and no dead prints. It is the sort of thing that recovers the economics of a job wonderfully well.