markwilliam1 wrote:
I’ve owned 3 Wide Format Epson printers and unless you use them constantly the heads Will Clog! I switched to the Canon Pixma Pro 100 and have Never had a clogged head even it if sits for long periods of time. I Highly recommend Canon over Epson!
The draw of Epson printers is the OEM ink. High end Epson printers use dense pigment inks that provide an extremely wide color gamut and the most extreme print longevity available. A trade-off for those two desirable features is the potential for head clogging.
If you are a professional artist or photographer who prints several times a week or more, head clogging is not likely to be an issue. The key is to buy your ink from a high-volume source so it is fresh when you get it, and then use it all up, A) before the expiration date, AND B) within six months of installing a cartridge. Also, DO NOT let the printer sit without making prints for more than a week.
Large format printers typically have plastic tubing to carry the ink from the cartridge bay on one end of the printer to the heads that slide along a rail in the center of the printer. It is critical to NOT let pigment "settle out" in those lines. Hence, the need to USE the printer frequently.
Another warning I'll mention is that some third party inks don't mix well with Epson inks. Some brands will actually cause precipitates to form in the ink lines and heads, at the point where the third party ink mixes with the last of your Epson ink. That, of course, leads to clogs.
If your environment is a busy art school, a photo lab, a museum that prints artists' work for sale to patrons on a daily basis, or you are a professional photographer specializing in large landscapes or wall-hanging "carriage trade" portraits larger than 16x20 inches, then owning your own high-end Epson makes lots of sense. But if you make a few dozen prints a year, work with a custom lab to have them do it. Otherwise, it is not worth the hassle.
We had three wide-format Epsons in the school portrait lab I worked for. I ordered the first of them in 2003. It ran 8 to 24 hours a day, flawlessly, for years. The only two times the heads clogged were when it sat for almost two weeks in the summer, and when one of my employees ordered third party inks for it. The latter incident resulted in the need for a head replacement and all-new ink lines. Epson's technician showed me how the precipitate that formed from the third party ink mixing with Epson ink was hard as a rock. That printer was still going in 2011 when our corporate fathers sold our division to another company.
If you DO high volume work, seek a source for paper and ink that will give you a volume discount. We bought our supplies from Fuji-Hunt at a VERY substantial discount. But we used hundreds of square feet of paper every week, and we ordered four or five of each ink cartridge at a time.
High end inkjet printing requires some special knowledge of how to handle prints after they are made. They need to "out-gas" the ink solvents under sheets of blank newsprint for 24 to 48 hours after printing, before mounting or framing or shipping them in tubes.
Another thing to be aware of is that your prints will look far better when printed on a high end inkjet than they do on conventional silver-halide-based chromogenic photo papers. They use lots of inks to provide a much wider color gamut than can be achieved with just the three dyes in a wet-process photo paper. The estimated life before fading is about five times longer, as well!