[Music]
hey everyone
wayne fox here this thing finally showed
up
i ordered this epson p900 well i tried
to order it
i think last march may maybe april
uh not in stock nobody had them i kept
looking around for him i tried to order
it myself through my dealership couldn't
get one
and i've been waiting ever since i
wanted to replace my p5000
i just don't need it it's a little big
i've got a 9570 which handles all my
roll paper stuff and i want something
that can handle
seven by ten art cards a little better i
sell quite a few of those
and so i thought you know i'm gonna go
ahead and get this and sell the p5000
well finally 10 months later here it is
uh epson's definitely had some
challenges through the pandemic as a lot
of people have
hopefully this means they're getting
into production and they'll be more
available
well i have it out of the box i didn't
see any sense in showing the whole
process
again make sure you get all the blue
tape off the design is nice it's very
compact
i like the way that it folds up when
you're not using it it's about
20 smaller than the previous printer the
piece uh
800 and 600 respectively from what i'm
told the
the new p900 is about the same size
as the old p600 so you get a 17 inch
printer in the same footprint
a couple of downsides to that and we'll
get to those in a minute what i thought
i would do is kind of go over a few the
the physical things it has a fairly
large touch screen
which can tip up like this and we'll get
to that in a minute
you can open up the paper tray and
you'll notice that both the input and
the output tray
have this kind of
i don't know what you want to call it
ribbed design and i assume that's for
weight because it is lighter than the
last printer
and it's also pretty rigid it's pretty
pretty nice one thing i did notice is
that the
the paper guides make you put the paper
in the middle
whereas in the previous printers uh
you've always put the paper to one side
and
i don't know if that's a big deal but
it's it's kind of nice and i
don't know if it actually makes a lot of
difference in the long run
um it has a pull out tray
which gives you access to the straight
paper path through
so what i thought i would do now is
let's go ahead and get it started up
and get the inks loaded and then we'll
talk about a couple of the other
features while those
the inks are loading one thing is kind
of nice is the ink itself
comes in this nice little box now one of
the disadvantages of this printer
is the ink cartridges are smaller to get
the smaller footprint
and so the ink cartridges are only 50
milliliter
the old printer the cartridges are 80
milliliter that actually means your ink
is going to be a little more expensive
than a p800
and you know everybody complains about
ink costs
a lot anyway i've always had the
philosophy that you know
my ink costs are what they are and i
charge plenty for my prints that that's
really a non-factor for me
other people it might be feel
differently that's fine now the other
thing that i've been told and i can't
verify this somebody says that the
starter cartridge is only 25 milliliter
and then the replacements are 50. i
think there'll be plenty of ink one nice
feature is
since we don't have to switch between
matte and photo black that will save a
lot of light black ink and the old
printers
it would charge the photo black and the
light black
channel then it would have to switch so
it could charge the matte black line
well that would recharge the light black
channel
so you literally would almost be out of
light blacking by the time you started
with this printer once we get the ink
started it's all going to have the same
amount of ink
and we'll be able to print i think quite
a few prints before we have to buy ink
one nice thing about the box is
if you need you need to shake these
before you use them and what i do is
i'm just going to shake them in the box
you want to hold it flat
very gentle probably around 20 25 30
seconds
and then what i usually do is i just
turn it over
and now i'll shake it kind of the other
way you don't want to be too violent
with this
most of these ink cartridges probably
haven't been sitting that long because
it's such a new printer
we'll open up the panel
and it's pretty straightforward i'm just
gonna
put one in and then we'll pause the
video and
i won't show you how to put every one of
them in basically just tear it open
this is mk so you wanna find the mk
you're gonna push it in oh it looks like
we have to drop this down as well there
we go
you're gonna push it in to hear a firm
click
and then you're good to go so now we've
got the ink cartridge installed
and when we shut the cover
it will recognize that and now it's
going to charge this process will take
probably 30 minutes or so
okay well that didn't take as long as i
thought it would it only took about 15
minutes the print is ready to go
first thing i always do is just go ahead
and print a nozzle check just to make
sure that
nothing went wrong let's load some paper
i have some regular just regular typing
paper here i found that
the way that this loads i actually
really like it because what you do is
you just spread the
guys all the way apart drop your paper
somewhere in the middle
notice as soon as i do it's asking me to
put in a paper type
then i just move it and it'll center the
paper up
you know if i drop it over here for
example it'll just kind of center the
kind of self-center so it's a really
nice feature
notice here it tells me how many sheets
of the type of paper so if i go the
paper type and we'll put in
plain paper and then the paper size
us and psi eight and a half by eleven
and now it tells me i can put in 120
sheets at one time in the feeder
if i want to with this thin of a paper
let's go back to home
and we're going to go to menu
maintenance
and then at the top it says print head
nozzle check
so we'll just do that start
while it's doing that let's talk real
quickly about the inks here you can see
my ink levels
you can also get to that another way but
not while it's printing
it's giving me a print dialog box here
and that's
actually also a progress bar so later
when we do a long job we'll see that
the you'll notice the ink levels are
about
i would say 25
full in the large printers when you put
in a cartridge
it shows full regardless of the uh size
of the cartridge so if i put in a 350
or 150 or 700 the bar is full
and so to understand how much inks left
i have to
understand which cartridge what size
cartridges i've used
now in this case i'm going to go ahead
and
assume that what's going on here
let's see there we go is because this
only holds 50 milliliter cartridges
based on the level here i'm assuming
that's showing me how much
in relation to 50 milliliters i might
say millimeters once in a while i got to
do that
and the reason i say that is because
the if if this was a 25 milliliter
cartridge
and it's now 60 percent empty
that would mean we would have run around
300
milliliters of ink to get this thing
charged
there's just not that much tubing here
as you can see the maintenance tank is
barely registering anything at all
and so i think that right now this is
giving me a pretty good indication that
i have about
probably you know 18 to 19 milliliters
of color of ink left in most of these
cartridges
you'll notice that the light gray and
the gray have similar levels
now i have printed quite a few prints uh
and testing this
and so you see they've dropped a little
bit but
that's pretty typical you're always
going to use light gray and
gray probably the two most used colors
when you do your printing
because that's how it creates less
saturated color by mixing in some gray
anyway here's our nozzle check uh looks
really good one thing
that i might mention is what the printer
does
and i don't know if i can get this to
focus or not uh what the printer does is
it double prints the nozzles so prints
twice
and that makes it really dark if i
compare this to for example my 9570
it's actually hard to see because it
only prints one
time so it's kind of nice the yellow is
still hard to see but just because it's
so light
and i always use some really strong
reading glasses to double check
it so it looks like we're good to go so
the next thing we want to do
i always sent a target print now i
already did this yesterday so i'm not
going to go through it we're going to
print a different version of it
this is the target print that i
typically like to use
this is the one that jack fletcher did
and i guess maybe this is the right way
to hold it
jack flusher this is a modified version
of bill atkinson's target
which is a really good one if you're not
sure what i'm talking about here i have
a seven part video on color management
and part six talks about the advantages
of using a file like this to evaluate
your printer
and to try to get your color management
set up so anyway we printed this
yesterday
at the max settings and what i want to
do now is i want to print the same thing
at a lower quality setting so we can
compare the two i've also printed the
same thing on my
9570 and i can kind of look through the
three
what i think we'll find is based on the
quality setting that you really won't
use the max setting very often
and we'll talk about what's going on
there as we get into that so let's just
jump into lightroom and send a
file or send this file at a lower
quality setting and then we can compare
how long it takes to print
uh by going into the menu here
okay so i'm in lightroom and i'm not
going to go into a lot of detail here
just to try to keep this video from
getting too long here's the file we want
to print we'll select that go to the
print module
i've already set up my template and just
real quickly we'll just show this i've
connected this printer
using uh usb and uh my airplay or my uh
wi-fi is a little flaky lately
so we just make sure we've selected that
and the only reason i want to show this
is i want to talk briefly about
the printer settings first of all
there's one new choice here
use printer settings so if i set up a
paper types in
the printer itself like we did a minute
ago with the
typing paper i can just tell the printer
driver to use whatever the printer has
loaded i don't have to put all that in
that could be really handy if you're
doing a lot of different printing and
off and on
or you can go ahead and you can go to
the paper size and set it
if i put a paper type in here it will
override whatever is put in the printer
all right i'm not sure what the little
triangle means
so we'll have to try to figure that out
um anyway
what i really wanted to talk about was
this
the quality options you'll see that i
have this paul
this menu here and there are five
choices plus
a quality option as i move each choice
you'll see that it changes
the different settings and basically
each setting
is one a notch on this little indicator
and what i want to do is talk a little
bit about what the differences are
and of course if i go to the bottom
setting i can override anything
so for example if i go to high quality
that's
black enhanced overcoats turned on it's
resolution 1440.
if i go to quality options for example i
can say no i don't want the black
overcoat
but i still want to use 1440 at photo
now if we look at the different options
with this particular paper
as you change papers it will change the
options based on what the paper is
capable of
for example if you have a matte paper
you're not going to get the choice of
5760.
now we're going to talk a little bit
about the head in just a minute but one
of the new features of this head it can
make
the dots it spits out can be as little
as 1.5 pico liters
which is the last the p800 is 3.5 pico
liters
and because of that it can create this
ultra ultra fine resolution
what we have to understand is how you
gain the resolution
uh vertically you'll notice that 1440
is a 1440 resolution and i'm not sure
what the
horizontal resolution is you'll notice
these two the only difference is
uh let's go back here you'll notice that
these two the only difference is
standard has no black overcoat this one
has black overcoat
this one also says photo 1440
and then we jump all the way to 5760 and
that's kind of one of the problems that
i have
so the way the printer gets more quality
is it moves the paper less far
and creates extra passes of the print
head so it can put
the dots closer together the problem
with that is it takes more time
so at 1440 if you do a standard 1440 and
it takes 10 passes
to print one inch of paper that's a
theoretical if i go to 2880
then it's going to take 20 passes well
in this printer
i can't go to 28.88 and go to 5760
that means it's going to take 40 passes
so to go from 1440
to 5760 is going to take four times as
long
now the other thing to understand is
this uh if we go to
quality options then we go to superfine
photo 1440 what it's doing there is a
feature they used to call
super microweave and actually on the
printer when we
look that up that's still what it's
called what that does is it advances the
paper less distance and makes more
passes
but it still works in the 1440 dither
now this theoretically gives you a
little bit higher quality image
and to be honest based on the speed that
i'm seeing this probably is what epson
feels will be the default
i'm not sure why they're trying to get
to this super super super high
resolution
i need to do some more research on that
because i just don't know anybody that
can see
you know even a printer that's 300 dpi
like the canon and my other
epson that runs at a 2400 by 1200
matrix man they're sharp they're great
and so by going to this higher
resolution
it's going to take a long time now as i
mentioned i already printed this
yesterday
and i printed this at the max setting i
don't know where my camera is right
there
but i printed this at the max setting
and this took
almost 25 minutes to print on my printer
so what we're going to do now is we're
going to print this same print
but we're going to go to super photo
1440 with the black enhance overcoat
and let's just see how long it takes it
to print using this setting
one thing before we send it let's talk
let's just make sure we have our profile
it's loaded here if you're not familiar
with lightroom
profiles it only shows you the ones that
you choose and you can go to other
and anything i put a check mark in here
is available in that menu
so we have the right profile loaded and
we can just hit the print button because
we already set up the print settings
over here
and as long as we haven't done anything
to change them like pick another
template
this will just give us send us through
that same dialog box
so let's hit print
so let's take out the typing paper
and i have a sheet of 13 by 19 paper
here again i'm just going to spread it
open
drop it in
whoops let's raise the back so it'll
stay up
and then i'm going to just push it to
center paper type
you don't have to do this you can just
put it in the driver and this will
ignore all this but let's go ahead and
do it
one thing you'll notice there's very few
choices here and what happens is if i go
to more paper types
and let's say i wanted to use cold press
uh once i go to more paper types and i
choose one of those it will then show up
in this menu
so this little menu only ends up showing
the papers that you use
which is pretty nice we're going to use
ultra premium photo luster as our paper
go to paper sizes a series and this is a
little interesting because
usually it wants a3 or a4 or a2
but now it's actually giving me my
actual measurements which i think is an
improvement
i can't remember which a2 and 8 i don't
remember the sizes
so now i've put it in you notice it says
i can put 10 sheets of this paper in at
a time
hit ok now like i said i don't have to
do that because i can put it all in my
driver
let's pop back over and we're going to
send that file so i'm going to go ahead
and let this print
and when i get back we're going to take
a look in the menu choices and talk
about
how long it took to print each of those
and i have a little bit of a comparison
with a p800 i'm assuming most people are
watching this video
more to decide if they should buy the
p900 because they have a p800
rather than because they don't know
anything at all about it
some might be that way but anyway i'll
be back you'll notice here
my dialog box that says it's going to be
seven minutes
real quick let's just show a couple
things in this this little menu up here
lets me go to an information screen uh
i can rotate it so now i'm seeing the
photograph it's printing
if i touch it again i get information on
what's being printed
quality options and if i go here it
gives me another screen
if i'm not using color management but
i'm actually using the epson color
controls
this shows me what controls i've set up
and how i've set those up
i touch that to get rid of it again and
now as you can see through our dialog
box this is estimating taking seven
minutes to complete
and because the dark color is how far it
actually
finishes quicker than that sometimes but
we can go back in and find out how long
it takes when we're done so i'll be back
as soon as this is printed okay
the printer is finished it did take
around seven minutes we'll know exactly
here in just a second as we look at it
as far as the quality i do have here
the one i printed yesterday and i really
can't show you this on a video obviously
but if i hold them side by side uh
there really should the only apparent
differences should be
uh in you know ultra fine detail
and i was looking at these yesterday
this is the second or third time i've
printed it and you can see right here
i've got this
baby with a really ultra fine hair
and i was just i can't see any
difference between the two
i look at really small detail i mean i
put on
really strong reading glasses i've got
these reading glasses which
you know i have to hold it about here to
see stuff and
looking at all the ultra fine detail
i've got up in here
i just couldn't find any real visual
difference in the quality
now that tells me that i'm not sure what
epson is chasing this
ultra hold or high resolution other than
maybe there are some applications out
there i don't know about
where the printer is used and that does
count certainly not in continuous tone
photography so i think for most
photographers they're going to be really
happy with the 1440 photo
which is good because i had a friend of
mine print the same thing on his
p800 and i'm trying to remember what it
said but it took about
seven minutes at the max quality setting
of the p800
and so obviously the challenge i've got
is that this print took
25 minutes and i theoretically i'm going
to get better quality
i'm not sure why they didn't go ahead
and put a 2880 mode in there
but i guess it's because they felt the
1440 with microweave
was good enough and you know i would
tend to agree the other thing i might do
is just take a look and compare this
to my 95 70. and again i'll hold this up
the color the camera is picking up the
color pretty good
obviously it's a real challenge but the
one thing i think you can see
is that you know the colors are really
close as i examine the two printers now
they do use the same ink set
i cannot find any difference in color
tone if you look at my
for example the the sky i don't see a
you know a lot of times if you go
between two printers you'll see a little
bit of a bias
toward magenta or less magenta in the
sky i don't see any
bias in skin tones and when i compare
these four skin tones
and you know overall i'm there's nothing
i can see as far as the
the you know this strip along the bottom
is one reason i like this target
because i can really see at what point
can i pick out
detail at what point can i see the white
box as we go in the black box
so i can really see how good the printer
holds shadow and highlight detail
we're going to talk about the ink set
and the gamma here in just a second
but bottom line is the two printers are
virtually identical
so let's real quick take a look at the
actual timing this is another nice
feature of the printer
if i go here this little icon is the
representative of the history
and this shows me a little picture of
the job that i printed
and it gives me all the information here
tells me you know the size of the paper
1440
this is the one we just printed and
you'll see that microweave is turned on
over code is turned on and if i go down
to the bottom you'll see it took 6
minutes and 39 seconds
to print that print if i go here
and that's the one i printed yesterday
and again we can see
maximum quality carbon black option
5760 by 1440. again microweave is on
if i go all the way down you'll see this
took
25 minutes and 15 seconds uh that's kind
of a nice little feature now if you turn
the printer off you lose the history
you know i really wanted to address the
whole quality thing so you really
understand those settings and what
you're going to get
and if you buy one of these printers
you're just going to have to test them
the real question would be okay is the
800 still better because it's a little
faster
i don't think so i think that the 1440
photo quality is going to be
more than anybody needs but you know
i don't think that the 5760 is
definitely not a reason to run out and
buy this printer if you've got a really
good
800 and you're happy with it one feature
that's kind of nice is this little door
pops open
this gives you access to where you uh
use
hook up the usb and the ethernet because
it's not at the back of the printer you
can actually plug those in
without having to move the printer away
from the wall most of epson printers in
the past they've been down the bottom in
the middle
and they're really a pain to get to
unfortunately they did do the same thing
with the ac switch or plug
it still sticks out and it's kind of a
pain it would have been nice if they
would have made it a right angle plug
i guess it's still you know you need to
leave room with it for this
and so maybe it's not a big deal i don't
know let's talk a little bit about the
head itself
uh the head is a new design if you
here's a comparison of the two as you
can see in the old head
you could definitely see the eight rows
of uh
nozzles where the inks come out this new
head you can't see those at all
it's a tin color head has ten inks the
other printer was an eight color
head with nine color inks so that's
where the switching came in
and so theoretically it's supposed to
have a better coating on it so
it's less likely to clog now the p800
than the predecessor 3880 3800
those have all been pretty good about
that anyway the inks themselves
basically they're all the same except
they've renamed them now i'm not saying
they're the same formulation
and we'll see that in a second we're
going to take a look at the profile
once i couple more things here but
they changed the name of light black and
light light black to gray and light gray
which actually makes more sense to me
and this printer uses of what's called
violet now i think they've found
in their testing they've tried different
things they've tried an orange and a
green
and then the last printers they you
could get a violet option
i think they found with violet they
really address
some gamut issues and the one thing that
violet does is give
you more accurate blue tones at least
that's what i'm feeling right now
uh that expands the gamut in the the
that area quite a bit and i think that
the violet ink is probably a good choice
now
let's be honest even though it's got a
bigger gamut we're going to talk about
that in just a second
that's not another reason to run out and
buy this printer because i don't think
visually
other than maybe a little accuracy in
the blues i don't think there's going to
be a lot of difference
so real quick let's take a look at the
profiles and the gamuts and compare the
two
so here we have the uh manufacturer
profiles provided by epson
we'll see that these are both 16-bit
table pro based profiles
the maximum black on the p800
is l4 and if we look here the maximum
black on the p
900 is l3 so we do get a little black or
black now that's
a pretty small amount let's take a look
at the gamut here we have 731
000 is the gamma volume compared to 784
000 so it's about 50 000 more
i don't know what the percentage is
epson says that's about 6
the one thing i will say is epson does
make very high quality profiles now
it's really rare that you need to make
your own anymore
i do it just to make sure that from
printer to printer i get a really good
match
let's just take a look at the gamuts as
far as on a graph
this is the gamut volume of the
p800 and as you can see if we
overlay the p900 in a wireframe anywhere
that we have the white wireframe outside
of
the p800 that's increased colors that we
can get out of a p900
notice at the bottom uh we definitely
have more darker colors that are
available
there are a few areas where the p800
actually excels
but notice how much we have over here in
these blues
and these are the colors i'm really
interested in because of accuracy and
sky
pretty good in the red and yellows as
well which so a little better gamut
maybe a little more accurate blues
not sure that's a reason to rush out and
buy one but
the quality is pretty outstanding i i
really like the quality of my 9570
i don't know that i like it you know
i've been getting great prints out of
epson printers for a long time
so it's hard to really say wow you know
no leaps and bounds we're kind of at a
point of diminishing returns
where you really aren't going to see
huge differences in the output
of these printers so it's more about
features the
couple of other things i might mention
the printer does come with a light
and it's pretty cool as the prints you
can see down inside i might
i'll throw a video up there we'll uh and
add it to the video
and you can turn it on uh even if it's
not printing so
right now it's on and while it's
printing you can actually turn it off if
you don't want it
they're led so no reason to turn them
off and on
when you're printing both printers are
able to handle roll paper
the p700 actually has a roll paper
adapter built into it pops open the back
and it pulls out
it'll only handle the small rolls of
paper that epson makes and of course
only up to 13 inches wide
i've never actually used this smaller
format printer another downside to the
p700 is that i think the inks are only
about
25 milliliter and they're probably going
to cost you another 10 to 12 percent per
milliliter more
than the p900 now the roll paper adapter
for the p900 is a fairly large unit
and it makes the printer much larger i
don't know if it's six seven eight
inches
deeper the downside to that because it's
no longer a really desktop printer
but the upside is it'll handle the full
size rolls the three inch rolls
and the hundred foot rolls so you can
use the
the lowest price paper now there's no
cutter in either one you have to deal
with that but still if you're printing
panels
it's a really good option as far as the
price itself the p900 is actually a
hundred dollars cheaper than the p800
now granted the p800 you could always
get a rebate so it usually ran for two
or three hundred less than the retail
price
i don't think you'll see rebates on this
printer soon
with the pandemic and the short supply
but i do feel that at some point when
things are
getting a little more back to normal
you'll probably be able to get rebates
on this printer as well so it might be a
little less expensive to buy
out the gate okay well that brings me to
the 1200
question which i'll try to answer
whether you should upgrade or not
i think the main reason anybody want
consider upgrading would be if they do a
lot of
ink switching obviously it's nice that
uh
head technology has gotten their
manufacturing has gotten cheap enough
they can actually put
more channels in their head that's
always been kind of the hard part with
epson their heads are much more
expensive to make than canon or
hp and so it's nice now to have that for
me that was one thing that i really
liked about it
i do a lot of document printing as well
and i always hated the switch from photo
black to matte black just because i
wanted to print a sheet of
typing paper in a document sometimes i
didn't bother but it all
it does look better so that's one major
factor
it's a little smaller it's a little
lighter it's
definitely more of a desktop printer
than the other one
the touch screen is really really nice
really helpful
the center mechanism to center the paper
much nicer than i thought it would be
it's just really quick to load a sheet
of paper
or piece a stack of paper in there
the overall design i think is quite a
bit of an improvement so
that's not a lot of reason to upgrade
but you know you throw it all together
and it is a nice printer
maybe you want to let your p800 wear out
before you do it maybe you could sell it
probably a pretty good market for those
the other question would be should you
get a 700 to the 900
and the 700 is a great printer do
understand that the ink costs will be
higher because the cartridges are
smaller
and the challenge with the 700 is that
you know if you want to print a 17 inch
by 22 inch print you can now for me
that's the reason i would buy the larger
one
because that even though i might not
want to do that very often
if i think at all that i might want to
do it once in a while it would be kind
of nice
now it is cheaper and for a lot of
people they're just printing you know a
lot of four by fives and eight by tens
and
maybe up to 11 by 14 and they don't mind
having somebody else print that
occasional big print so it's kind of a
budget thing
every person's got to make their own
decision i'm glad i upgraded because i
do
print a lot of matte paper and i also
a lot of glossy small prints and so it's
really going to be handy for me i
like the idea of maybe getting more
accurate blues and so that was kind of
another reason i decided to give it a
try
so anyway i hope that i've answered all
your questions i'm going to be doing
some research on the
carbon black thing and the gloss overlay
thing and i'll probably do a separate
video just on those
try to see if i think it's really worth
it i think they'll both consume more ink
and it might not really visually provide
anything at all now i know that they
are trying to make these printers better
but to be honest the printed output has
gotten so good that most of what you see
when they come out with a new printer is
pretty much just industrial design
ergonomics
not really about print quality itself
because print quality has been really
good for
quite some time if you have any
questions hit me with a comment down
below
i will be glad to give it a try to
answer those sometimes i don't get a
notification from youtube sorry if i
miss them once in a while
in the meantime make sure you subscribe
to the channel and hit the bell so when
i get that done you can see it
i do really appreciate those that watch
my videos i know i don't get a lot of
watches
but this is gives me something to do
it's a lot of fun and every once in a
while i have a video that surprises me
and i get a lot of watches
anyway hey thanks for watching see you