Should I upgrade my Epson 4000

I bought an Epson 4000 shortly before the 4800 was introduced.

I am perfectly happy with the 4000. Should I upgrade? I haven't

seen any prints from the 4800. Does any one like 4000 prints more

than 4800 prints?

Mike Reichman has done a good rundown on the pros and cons of the 4000 v. 4800:

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/printers/4800-1st.shtml

Another set of useful links...

http://www.magicpixel.com.au/epson4800blog/index.cfm

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1013&thread=14437360

Norman,

NO! A month ago I ordered the 4800. After it arrived, I read the instruction book and then did some more research on the Internet. With the new 4800, Epson added another ink Light light black. This took the extra slot that had allowed both black inks to be installed. Now to switch back between matte and glossy inks, you are required to spend a half hour of tedious steps to change over the ink tanks, dumping $75 worth of inks while doing it. Wasting $150 in inks to switch to and then from the existing inkset is insane, and will only benefit Epson on the sale of inks.

The black ink switching and the resulting waste in time and inks were unacceptable. Epson is trying to minimize this costly ink blunder at our expense. Furthermore, it is inconceivable that Epson would revisit this very problem after it was solved with both matte and glossy inks being installed in the 4000 at the same time. The option of switching back and forth with the 4000 is much better economically. The printer driver for the 4000 decides which inks are used for each paper selected.

I returned the 4800 and went looking for a 4000. They are getting hard to find new. My 4000 arrived yesterday after being shipped from California to NJ. No rebate either.

The introduction of 3 Black inks in the 4800 is wonderful if you did a lot of B&W. Since I have no desire to produce B&W prints, those benefits are useless to me and come at too high a cost. If you were printing on just one type of paper, matte or glossy, the 4800 would be a great printer. But after spending $2500 on the printer and extra inks, I don?t want to be limited in my choice of papers that the 4800 would force me to do, because of the expense of changing over the black inks for matte and glossy papers.

I guess you could always purchase two 4800 printers??.one for matte, one for glossy?

Maybe Epson will have such a glut of unsold 4800?s they will offer you two for the price of one?

Depends what you like to do. I do a lot of B&W (see my site) and I'm getting superb results

from my 4800 staight out of the box - no RIP needed. No metamerism and get great results

on non-matte papers. Color is excellent too. Check out the above reviews.

<I>I am perfectly happy with the 4000. </I><P>

OTOH, why change if you're perfectly happy?

From my comparison of the two inksets the Ultrachrome K3 produces marginally better prints than the old Ultrachrome inkset (though I never owned one of the Ultachrome generation so my exposure was simply to others prints). The increased density is very nice and there is slight increase in colour gamut.

For B&W the 4800 with Epson inkset is better than the 4000 with the Epson inkset due to the Light-Light Black. I don't know but the bodies of these printers are so similar that I expect the performance with 3rd party inksets will be virtually identical.

Brian, by the time that the 4800 was shipping to consumers the ink swapping problem was well documented. The 4800 is really a professional grade printer rather than a consumer grade printer and most bureaus that use it will simply buy 2 (the printers are practically free given the cost of consumables).

I agree that Epson should have worked out how to mount both Photo Black and Matte Black if you wanted to do away with the Light Light Black (it can't be all that hard), or at least ensured that only that line was purged, but the tradeoff was clear. There are 4000 still for sale.