Joined in 2023 
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Engineered with Micro Piezo heat-free technology, you can enjoy consistent highspeed printing, with greatly reduced energy consumption so you can save time and money. This pushes the file resolution well above what might be thought best for such prints. Now that in itself is not really a problem but I was printing the image on one of my card templates, which are 300 ppi, so I needed to scale the image. The sharpening of the scaling gives the resulting cards very good crisp detail, whilst still maintaining the watercolour look. I wanted to see if it could be used for something a bit more taxing. Scanning a watercolour painting and printing as a greeting card. I have a video about this and will shortly have a more detailed article.
Using the spare ink left over, it was time to top up the tanks (remember ink is used during setup – filling the various tubes and printhead. Hence the width set at 329mm above rather than 330mm. I’ve heard of people having problems setting widths for custom papers. If your 13″ x30″ custom size wont work, try 12.95″ width in the custom size settingThe built in scanner can be used as a basic copier onto plain paper. It has no document feed, but to be fair if I want document feeding I’ll buy a full time office printer. For myself, the ‘office functions’ of this printer are a distant second in my concerns compared with art/photo printing. The ET series are capable plain-paper office printers. I didn’t time the output when I printed text documents, but it was certainly fast – practically, it’s more than fast enough for almost any single user or even for a couple of users to share, and it’s nowhere near sturdy enough to serve a larger workgroup as an office printer, no matter how tempting the ink cost might be. Print quality is also very good – most modern office inkjets do a nice job, and the ET-8550 is certainly right in that range. It’s clearly better than a four year old Epson WorkForce all-in one I had around for comparison. It’s not quite at the level of some of the HP OfficeJets as a text printer. Of course, the gold standard for text printing is a decent laser printer, and no “normal” inkjet is as good as a good laser. I haven’t used the higher-end HPs that claim to be true laser quality, but my suspicion is that they’re quite a bit better than most inkjets – the OfficeJets right below them are notable for their text quality.
It will probably be a difficult printer to find profiles for, too. No major paper manufacturer other than Epson is supplying any profiles yet… What might eventually arrive? I’d put at least some Red River papers in the “probably” category – they already have profiles for a few other EcoTank models and many other dye-based Epsons. Will they include the more interesting papers? Both Hahnemuhle and Moab are at least possibilities – they offer profiles for a few Epson dye inkjets, and this is one of the more photo- oriented models to come out in some time. Canson Infinity seems unlikely, since every Epson printer they support so far is a pigment model. It should be possible to make custom profiles, but that seems like a lot of effort for this type of printer. Profiling hardware is expensive, and it is somewhat difficult and time-consuming to use. Easier to use profiling hardware exists, but is several times the price of this printer. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
Customer reviews
Remember me? The famous old Stylus Pro 3880 isn’t a bad image quality comparison – more inks, but the ET-8550’s more modern inks and tiny droplets help compensate.
The Epson EcoTank ET-8550 is one of the first ink tank printers designed specifically for large format (A3+) photos. It prints at a maximum resolution of 5760 × 1440 dpi. To keep the printing costs within reasonable limits, ink tanks with a 6-colour system are used. According to the manufacturer, a complete colour set is sufficient for 2300 photos on 10×15 cm photo paper. A pre-selection can be made directly on the printer's 10.9 cm touch screen thanks to SD and USB slots. Its price is high, but it is offset by the great performance of the device: according to the manufacturer, it is capable of printing up to 2,300 photos with a single set of ink bottles. Modern Features Saving the image as a TIFF file (colour management turned off), I was able to import it into i1Profiler to create a custom profile. The printer accepts custom paper sizes up to just short of a metre. Some printer marketing points to lengths up to 2m, but not on my Mac.Printing is slow or the printer stops printing when I try to print from Windows or my Mac. What should I do? In addition to writing hundreds of articles for PCMag, over the years he also wrote for many other computer and business publications, among them Computer Shopper, Digital Trends, MacUser, PC World, The Wirecutter, and Windows Magazine. He also served as the Printers and Scanners Expert at About.com. The Epson install software (on my MacBook in this instance) is fairly smart, giving you a number of ways of connecting the printer. This is a printer that can fire the printing enthusiasm – sure, paper will cost and the inks will need filling up, but it’s easy to use. Dan Wells, "Shuttterbug" on the trail, is a landscape photographer, long-distance hiker and student in the Master of Divinity program at Harvard Divinity School. He lives in Cambridge, MA when not in wild places photographing and contemplating our connection to the natural world. Dan's images try to capture the spirit he finds in places where, in the worlds of the Wilderness Act of 1964, "Man himself is but a visitor". He has hiked 230 miles of Vermont's Long Trail and 450 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail with his cameras, as well as photographing in numerous National Parks, Seashores and Forests over the years - often in the offseason when few people think to be there. In the summer of 2020, Dan plans to hike a stretch of hundreds of miles on the Pacific Crest Trail, focusing on his own and others' spiritual connection to these special places, and making images that document these connections.
The scanner has a rated 1,200 x 4,800 dpi resolution – what you choose to use it at though will depend a lot on what you are scanning and why. The glass is ~8.5″ x 14″ So, a Hahnemuhle 210gsm watercolour paper was in the ‘big gamut’ category, whilst the Fotospeed Platinum Cotton 305 was in the small gamut camp (and hence much better for B&W). For some colour images (such as the scanned watercolour) it worked well, but paper choice should partly be driven by what sorts of image you want to print.In general, art papers print well with the 8550 ink set, especially with the VFA media setting. That said, experimentation is necessary. It’s a wide format printer, which means it can take paper up to A3+ in size, and it has two paper trays and a rear feed, so you can effectively have three types of paper loaded and ready to print on, depending on what kind of project you’re working on. Last but certainly not least, Epson has built in a scanner and copier, making this a true multifunctional marvel. Epson also quotes yields in terms of 6 x 4in photos. A full set of colour inks will print 2,300 photos, which works out to 3.4p per print, based on the presumption that all the inks are used up at the same rate. Canon’s Pixma PRO-200 inks yield an average of 550 photos for a full set of inks, which works out to around 27p per print. The ET-8550’s prints might not be quite as good, but they’re a lot cheaper.
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