TechRevu Review

Epson Stylus Pro 7900 - 24
Review by David Em
Epson Electronics ISBN/ITEM#: B001NZM89M
Date: 11 January 2009 List Price $3995 Amazon US / Amazon UK

Links: Epson 7900 Product Page / Show Official Info /

Epson knocks one out of the park with their new 7900 photo-quality printer. This might be the printer that recaptures fine art dominance for them.

Epson's been the leader in photography and fine art inkjet printing for the last ten years. Recently the company's faced its first serious competition from Canon and Hewlett-Packard, whose new professional printers have more colors and features than Epson's previous offerings.

Printer Update:

See David Em's review of the Epson Stylus Pro 3880, which David calls, "The World's Best Desktop Printer"...and he's no pushover.

Now Epson's battling its way back to the top of the heap with the new $3,995 Stylus PRO 7900 and $5,995 9900 printers. My associate Mark Beaulieu bought a 7900 a couple weeks ago, and last week we put it through its paces.

CONSTRUCTION AND SETUP

The Stylus PRO 7900 produces 24-inch wide prints (its nearly identical cousin, the 9900, has a 44-inch wide bed). This printer's an industrial-strength device. Its chassis is fifty-four inches wide, it's four feet high, and it weighs in at over 185 pounds. The 7900's physical construction is a significant improvement over its predecessor, the 7800, with metal replacing plastic from top to bottom. The elegant black and silver exterior will be right at home in professional art and photography studios.

The instructions provided for assembling and networking the printer are thin; getting it up and running cost more than a few pulled hairs. Assembling the paper catcher was particularly convoluted. Once the beast was set up however, many fine design touches came to light.

The 7900's roll print loading system is the best I've seen. Modular end clamps securely attach a paper roll to the printer via a grip system that accommodates both two- and three inch-wide cores, so you don't have extra end pieces lying around. They also detach easily, unlike some that need to be practically whacked off with a hammer.

The printer supports Mac Leopard 10.5 or higher and 32- and 64-bit Windows Vista and XP. For connectivity it has one USB 2.0 port and one 10/100Base-T Ethernet Port.

PAPER HANDLING

You load both rolls and single sheets of paper from the front of the printer, so you don't have to move it from the wall once it's up and running. After attaching a roll of paper, you feed it into the printer's vacuumized paper path and in a couple minutes you're good to go. Every roll we used loaded without a problem, a far cry from some competitive printers that force you to reload the paper over and over until the printer gives in and decides it's finally just exactly right.

Loading single sheets is also easy once you've figured out how to do it (it took us several passes before we got it right), however 8.5-inch x 11-inch sheets (the smallest media size the printer accepts) sometimes got stuck in the paper path and ejected in a way that could potentially damage the print. A nice touch is that you can adjust the platen for different paper thicknesses. You can buy a $1,495 spectrophotometer from Epson that fits onto the 7900 to profile your own media.

Loading the inks is literally a snap. It accommodates 150ml, 350ml, and 700ml cartridges (a typical desktop cartridge contains about 12 ml of ink). The printer generates some noise while it's working but it's not too bad. There's some very minimal ink odor as well, but that's not bad either. The 7900's fast. An 18-inch x 24-inch print set to the maximum resolution of 2880 dpi takes about fifteen minutes.

The only serious ergonomic issue is the paper catcher, the cramped design of which leaves a lot to be desired. Paper comes out of the printer along a nearly vertical path. If you're using matte papers that take a while to dry, you stand a good chance of damaging your prints. After a while, we gave up on the catch tray and built a low table for the prints to land on horizontally.

There must be a way to have the paper cutter wait for a minute or two before cutting a finished print from the roll, but we never found it. This became an issue with prints that weren't long enough to land on our improvised table, meaning they could be damaged in the catch tray unless someone was Johnny on the spot to catch it by hand. We wound up turning the automatic cutter off, and performed cuts by pressing a button on the front panel.

I appreciated that the images were perfectly centered on the paper, something Epson and their competitors have had some issues with in the past.

THE INKS

The Stylus PRO 7900 comes with a new set of eleven pigmented inks Epson's branded as UltraChrome HDR Ink (HDR stands for High Dynamic Range). Epson represents the HDR inks have a light-fastness rating in both color and black and white of two hundred years.

The most significant advance in this generation of inks is the addition of green and orange inks to create a lineup that consists of Cyan, Light Cyan, Magenta, Light Magenta, Yellow, Orange, Green, Light Black, Light Light Black, Photo Black, and Matte Black. (Photo black is for use on glossy and luster surfaces, while Matte Black is for matte "fine art" papers.)

The printer uses a new nozzle configuration to spray the inks. Each color channel has 360 nozzles. Photo Black and Matte Black share the same nozzles, for reasons understood only by Epson. This shared arrangement requires cleaning the black nozzle when you switch from one black to the other, wasting both time and ink.

The first time we switched the blacks, several of the starter inks that came with the printer were running low at between ten and fifteen percent capacity. It turns out that after the black ink swap, the printer runs an Automatic Nozzle Detection cycle. If a cartridge level doesn't support the possible cleaning volume, then it needs to be swapped out for one with more ink, even if that ink's not engaged in the process.

I suppose this is a conservative approach, but the bottom line was we had to replace all the low inks before the printer would let us proceed. Working it all out took over twenty minutes. Then we swapped the newly installed full cartridges back out for the original low ones, which worked just fine until they actually ran out of ink many prints later.

Another hassle was the system's ink maintenance tank, a replaceable plastic well that stores used ink that I suppose comes from the cleaning of the lines. Ours was nearly filled after running only a little over a hundred feet of paper. This is one more consumable item connected to running the 7900 that I don't recall having to deal with on similar class printers.

Epson's done a great job formulating the HDR inks. There is virtually no bronzing effect or gloss differential on photo papers. By contrast, HP's competitive Z3100 printer requires an entire coating pass of a separate transparent ink to accomplish the same thing.

SOFTWARE

The bright color front panel LCD display is generally easy to follow, however it's possible to get caught in a decision-tree loop that's difficult to escape from. At one point the printer detected there was a mismatch between the loaded gloss paper and the paper type set in the driver (Epson has four different gloss paper profiles), but there was no way to check the printer paper type settings to determine what the mismatch might be. Eventually I figured out that explicitly canceling the job internally reset the menu options, but the solution was less than obvious.

We printed from both PC and Mac environments. Epson's PC driver is a bit convoluted, but it works fine once you suss out the flow. The Mac driver is a little more fluid overall, but it had trouble remembering the correct printer and paper sizes even after we carefully set them. For some reason we had to perform this function twice for each image before the settings would stick.

The 7900 can print with a 16-bit workflow from the Mac. We ran into no problems with 16-bit images, but 8-bit pictures printed in 16-bit sometimes showed quantization artifacts and in one case dropped the oranges in the image entirely.

Epson will soon be offering a web browser page you can use to control the printer remotely as well as get printer stats and updates, but they're planning to charge about a hundred bucks for this privilege, which companies like Hewlett-Packard offer for free.

IMAGE QUALITY

With an ink droplet size of 3.5 picoliters, the 7900 produces excellent detail. Even at 1440 dpi resolution, half the maximum 2880 dpi, image resolution is very sharp. Pictures printed at 1440 resolution take half the time to print as 2880 dpi.

We tested the 7900 with two photo papers, Epson SemiGloss and Crane Silver Rag, and two matte papers, Schoellershammer Velvet and Crane Portfolio Rag. The bright white Epson SemiGloss produced excellent color but scratched easily and retained its paper roll. Crane's warmer and heavier Silver Rag produced superb tone and color results and flattened out quickly. Although the ink system is nearly instant-dry, both papers were more resistant to abrasion after they'd had time to air dry for a while.

The Schoellershammer Velvet has a very nice smooth surface, but the results were not as saturated as we expected, and the blacks were rather flat. The warmer Crane Portfolio Rag delivered excellent color and deep blacks. We were able to see the wet ink on both these papers for several minutes after they'd emerged from the printer

The images on all four papers came out much darker and more saturated than I was expecting, based on my experience with Epson's previous-generation K3 inks. I had to lighten the exposure on all the images to correct them. The results were well worth the effort. The color and tonal range on the prints were noticeably superior in many cases to the K3 inks, both in terms of overall density and color purity.

The benefits of the new orange and green inks were very apparent. In one of our tests of a photograph of a Plumeria flower taken by Mark, there was a clear separation between the light green of the petal and the orange pollen dusting it. In previous-generation prints, those areas were formed by mixing colors to approximate the two hues. However with the HDR inks, each color was laid on discretely, resulting in a stunningly lifelike representation. We also produced black and white prints that were drop dead gorgeous, rivaling the best black and white chemistry-based photos, at least to my eye.

WRAP

Except for the paper catcher and minor software issues, this is the best printer we've ever tested for photography and fine art. Very Highly Recommended.

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