Epson ET-8550

Hello, this is my first post.
I'm looking for your help to understand if the Epson ET-8550 (Black [Pigment], Black Photo [Dye], Cyan [Dye], Yellow [Dye], Magenta [Dye], Gray [Dye]) will be a good printer for digital nagatives, for Cyanotype, Salt print, etc.
Do you also know if it supports photopolymer plates for direct printing, for subsequent gravure printing?

My images are digital made with the Fujifilm GFX100s system.

Thank you very much.
Best regards..

Welcome to Photrio!

I am not sure you will get much info here as it is a printer that is not so popular as Epson's other conventional multi-ink photo printers, where some use QTRIP to control the ink density and ratios to get at an appropriate UV opacity for the transparency, if not adequate natively. As far as I know QTRIP does not support ET-8550. I suspect, you would be fine with cyanotypes but not so with salt prints which requires much denser negatives.

Here is a video where Keith Cooper talks a little bit about priniting digital negatives, but he does not actually make any contact prints.

You can also maximize UV opacity by finding a particular color for it which is quite possibly different from MK or PK using a method described by Peter Mrhar.

As to whether it supports printing on photopolymer plates, it seems it can print on poster boards with a rear paper feed as seen in another one of Keith Cooper's video - so it should handle a plate as well, I would guess.

No first hand knowledge on my part, I am sorry.


:Niranjan.

nmp said:

Welcome to Photrio!

I am not sure you will get much info here as it is a printer that is not so popular as Epson's other conventional multi-ink photo printers, where some use QTRIP to control the ink density and ratios to get at an appropriate UV opacity for the transparency, if not adequate natively. As far as I know QTRIP does not support ET-8550. I suspect, you would be fine with cyanotypes but not so with salt prints which requires much denser negatives.

Here is a video where Keith Cooper talk a little bit about priniting digital negatives, but he does not actually make any contact prints.

You can also get maximize UV opacity by finding a particular color for it which is quite possibly different from MK or PK using a method described by Peter Mrhar.

As to whether it supports printing on photopolymer plates, it seems it can print on poster boards with a rear paper feed as seen in another Keith Cooper video - so it should handle a plate as well, I would guess.

No first hand knowledge on my part, I am sorry.


:Niranjan.

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Hello, thank you for your comment and suggestions. It seems that QTRIP will be necessary for more demanding negatives and only works with Epson printers with pigment inks, which is not the case with this EcoTank.
My problem has always been the exorbitant cost of these pigment inks in cartridges. I don't think I can justify a P700 or a P900 and their ink cost for a few years.
So I'm screwed .-)

Consider 3rd party inks. InkOwl for instance has relatively affordable inks, even if you have to import them from the US. You may be able to find a sweet deal on an old 3800 or 3880 in good shape; they are relatively sturdy machines and there are refillable cartridges for them so you can use the lower cost inks.

Atelier Cunha said:

Hello, thank you for your comment and suggestions. It seems that QTRIP will be necessary for more demanding negatives and only works with Epson printers with pigment inks, which is not the case with this EcoTank.
My problem has always been the exorbitant cost of these pigment inks in cartridges. I don't think I can justify a P700 or a P900 and their ink cost for a few years.
So I'm screwed .-)

Click to expand...

QuadTone Rip is not necessary for any negatives. It is, simply, one tool among many that can be used to print negatives. You are correct though, it only works with certain 'serious' Epson photo printers.

My view of using a non-'main stream' printer for printing digital negatives such as an EcoTank printer vs. 'known good' (for digital negatives) such as the P700/P800 is 'how much to you value your time' vs. 'how much money a printer costs.

You may eventually be able to make perfectly acceptable negatives with an EcoTank printer after much experimentation. The two majors factors to investigate are (as Niranjan points out) which color ink gives the highest density in the UV. It is very often, not black. Secondly, how much ink you can lay down on the transparency with getting into problems of pooling. This is adjustable with some printers but not others. I don't know about your printer specifically. Again Niranjan may be able to help here. I seem to remember he worked this out with a Epson P400.

Or, you can use a P700/P800 with well documented methods and have usable negatives in a fairly short time.

One approach is not better than the other. Rather they each have pluses and minuses (like every choice in life!) ;-)

If you do end up experimenting with making digital negative using your ET-8550, please consider documenting your results here so that others can benefit from your experience.

fgorga said:

Secondly, how much ink you can lay down on the transparency with getting into problems of pooling. This is adjustable with some printers but not others. I don't know about your printer specifically. Again Niranjan may be able to help here. I seem to remember he worked this out with a Epson P400.

Click to expand...

Unfortunately, the P400 does not allow the so-called print density adjustment like others in the category. So if you want to lay down more ink than the standard, you have to use QTR, which is what I ended up doing. OP has to check the specs on ET-8550 to see if they do have that capability so some density boost can be obtained from within the Epson driver itself.

Another avenue that can be pursued is to replace one of the black inks with an UV blocking ink (perhaps someone has already done that as it seems to be popular with with silk-screen making crowd, so check the internet.)

:Niranjan.

nmp said:

Another avenue that can be pursued is to replace one of the black inks with an UV blocking ink

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I considered suggesting the same, yes. Perhaps even straight in the black channel, a 1:1 dilution in another channel and 1:3 in yet another channel, and then manipulate the image in such a way that all three channels are used. To an extent, this could be done by making an image of the proper color - although you'd still end up with much less control than QTR would allow for.

However, it's conceivable that the regular black pigment is a decent UV blocker, since it's a pigment ink. Yellow will probably work quite well, too. This means that a regular B&W negative toned yellow might actually work well enough for processes like Van Dyke and maybe even salted paper.

I really appreciate your opinions and suggestions. I will investigate the possibility of "UV blocking ink". Of course, I will share here the results I can obtain if I follow this path; That's the spirit of a forum .-)

Keith talks about being able to have some control over color density using Epson software .-)

Atelier Cunha said:

Keith talks about being able to have some control over color density using Epson software .-)

Click to expand...

Good to know. Although you have to make sure that the density is increased for the step 1 - i.e. for RGB value of 0,0,0 or the Dmax. I am not sure Keith talks about that in the video. Simply making the print look darker by adding to the mid-tones won't do.

:Niranjan

Looks like you should get quite far with this when using the black pigment ink. The main concern is that this ink will likely do a much better job blocking UV than the dye inks used along with it, so you may end up having a coarse transition somewhere in the greyscale where the pigment ink kicks in. When profiling the digital negative, I expect this will become visible as a distinct kink in the curve you read after printing a greyscale with the target process. This will translate into a similar (but inverse) kink in the output profile. My main concern is that the steepness on either side of this kink will be such that tonality will suffer in that region of the curve due to posterization.

I also expect that the best performance will be had by printing a b&w image with a yellow toning layer, forcing the printer to use the yellow ink across the entire greyscale. I hope that the printer will actually continue laying down yellow dye on top of the black (pigment) ink right down to the blackest tone, although there's no guarantee this will happen, since there are a couple of ways of handling CMYK output and not all of them rely on C/M/Y being laid down in combination with K on the highest densities. It's device/implementation dependent.

But, as they say, the proof of the pudding...the above is all just theorizing. Just give it a go, see what happens.

nmp said:

Good to know. Although you have to make sure that the density is increased for the step 1 - i.e. for RGB value of 0,0,0 or the Dmax. I am not sure Keith talks about that in the video. Simply making the print look darker by adding to the mid-tones won't do.

:Niranjan

Click to expand...

Thank you for your comment. Let's see if I understand correctly what you say: the ink density must be increased in the 3 RGB channels with values 0,0,0, simultaneously and not just in the midtones; this is it?

Atelier Cunha said:

Thank you for your comment. Let's see if I understand correctly what you say: the ink density must be increased in the 3 RGB channels with values 0,0,0, simultaneously and not just in the midtones; this is it?

Click to expand...

I probably made it more complicated than it was necessary. What I meant was the density of the 100% step (Dmax) that counts. In the typical step-wedge like Stoffer's, it is the step 1.

Looks like there is an independent way to dial ink density from -50 to +20%, per this manual, p111. So basically it can add upto 20% more ink to the standard amount for whatever paper type you are selecting everywhere, inc;luding the 100% step - as I would understand.

It's kind of hard to speculate exactly what these things do unless you experiment and for that you have to have access to a printer. Would be nice if there is someone who has the printer that can print test negatives for you which you can use to do the process of your choice and see if they work. Otherwise upfront cost of the printer is pretty high even as the ink cost is low, only to find after having bought it that it may not satisfy all your requirement afterall.


:Niranjan.