B&W printer recommendations

[AndrewWenn]

Hi,
My Epson SP 600 has finally died (Well needs an expensive service at least). I wish to engage more seriously in B&W printing including toned prints. Any suggestions for an A3 (preferably) or A4 printer to purchase as a replacement please?

Andrew

 

[Conrad Chavez]

It depends on how seriously you want to get into toned B&W printing. If you liked your Epson SureColor P600 , you could move up to the P800 so that you could print A3.

For quick and easy toned B&W, the Advanced B&W feature of the Epson P600/P800 printer driver does a good job. However, it provides limited control and isn’t integrated with the color management system that Lightroom Classic (and Photoshop and others) use. That makes Advanced B&W hard to be repeatable, and you can’t preview it on screen.

If you are interested in complete control of toned B&W at the professional level, you could look into the Piezography or Paul Roark methods. These use both a set of custom toned grayscale inks and custom ICC profiles, so that you can dial in your toning very precisely across the entire dynamic range of the print and preview it on screen. If you go in this direction, then you should look at the links above to see which printers their systems work best with. However, this route is a major investment of time, technical study, and materials ($$$). Also, some newer printers are locking out the custom ink cartridges (by checking the chips on the cartridges) because the manufacturers want only their own inks to be used. So older printers in good working order are valued by those using these methods.

 

[AndrewWenn]

Thanks for your help here Conrad. It seems the situation hasn’t changed much from when I checked several years ago.
I am aware that certain companies are making it impossible to use alternative cartridges. I guess I was hoping that there was an off-the-shelf solution.
Of course the alternative may be to use a commercial printing agency and hope that I can find one that uses a paper that I like.
Andrew