Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2015/12/20/fancy-printer-review-epson-su.html
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Probably a great printer if used frequently. My fancy Epson printer has been a PITA because of how easily the print head clogs and how much expensive ink it takes to clean it. Wouldn’t have been an issue, I think, If I used the printer daily, but since I got it for fine printing on expensive papers, I didn’t. I’m disinclined to buy another Epson.
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Fancy printer “review”. How dumb do you think boingboing readers are?
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we got our five year old son the little Brother he wanted for Christmas last year. He likes colouring in the pictures we print out for him, and we’ve been impressed with the reliability and economy so far.
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Do you have any reason to believe that BB is getting payola for reviews, beyond the clearly-labeled referral link? Or do you just make a habit of throwing around accusations unencumbered by evidence?
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“the days of massive leaps in performance with almost all new printer (and camera) models are behind us”
Maybe I’m a bit out of the loop, but printers seem like largely stagnant, slow developing technology. There are occasional evolutionary improvements (like when some models eventually became able to connect to wireless networks long, long after wireless had become common) and minor improvements in resolution/print speed but I can’t recall ever seeing a new printer model and thinking there was any kind of massive leap in anything.
Same with my HP. Pretty much never use now. It’s cheaper to just put whatever I need printed on a memory card and take it to the nearest Office Depot and pay 12¢, than it is wasting paper, ink, and my time, to try and get the ink cartridges unclogged.
Adding more colors than CMYK in an inexpensive home printer was a really bold move the ten-fifteen years ago it happened, as well as using more than one black. And the inks and papers are really designed for museum use. A friend of mine printed two of the same images out and left one tacked to his fence. A year later and only the red has really visibly degraded, the other colors look really good.
But, as the review says, it’s been a while.
Were you around when laser printers became a thing? That was a pretty huge leap.
I do still miss the noise of my Imagewriter II though. Maybe I can dig it out of storage and somehow USBify it…
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Really? I don’t think you’d be able to do this sort of thing with even a slightly younger camera.
Finished footage is here:
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economy? lucky…my kids cost a small fortune! i do love their artwork, but the price per page is staggering. 
The Xerox wax/solid ink phaser ink is all lightfast and isn’t fugative and doesn’t fade. it is also waterproof. the print quality is beyond anything i’ve seen, even the museum quality wide formats. every time you turn the printer off it wastes approx $5 worth of ink clearing the ink channels though, so it is really only a good fit for a place doing print runs or leaving the printer on.
i can still remember the sound of dot matrix and daisey wheel printers! and the perforated sides of the paper with the holes to feed it through that you had to remove. the rainbow or black ink ribbons.
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Yes. I guess I forgot that there was some remarkable progress thirty years ago.
Are you having a malfunction?
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That was a quote from the article, though I was specifically talking about printers. Cameras have been making a lot of amazingly cool leaps on various fronts, so the article’s quote was doubly-wrong. Printers had a few points in the 80s and 90s where something cool happened and have been mostly skating since them.
I was struck by the camera remark, too. If there’s one single consumer electronics category which has moved on in leaps and bounds the last few years, it’s cameras. You can, for less than $1000, buy a pocket video camera that gets results roughly equivalent to decent 16mm film. And you can screw any glass onto it you can find an adapter for. It’s incredible.
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You’re also forgetting 3D printers.
ETA: And I just happened to come across this:
the inkjet-printed image takes up an area no larger than the cross-section of a human hair. The picture of a few clownfish in their sea anemone home measures just 80 µm x 115 µm for a total area of 0.0092 square mm.
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This is why we bought the black and white model - you don’t run out of a single colour and the price per page is much lower. 
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Not the same thing at all. The prints this machine makes replace large format prints that start at around $23 a pop at my local shop, not 12 cents. This doesn’t produce color photocopy quality images. It prints with archival pigment inks on high quality paper that starts at around $60 list for 25 sheets of 13"x19". If all you need is an occasional 12 cent print on 8 1/2" x 11" photocopy paper, then yeah, not the machine for you, and you wasted your money on your HP as well. The cost benefit analysis for me is $23 (minimum) a print vs. >$3 a print.
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Probably way better than any consumer 16mm rig. No gate weave. No gate hairs. WYIWYG monitoring. Though my Bolex H16 was about $175 - and now I can get an adapter to put the OEM Bolex lenses on my mirrorless camera for $5. I suspect my lenses will less than wow me when I do.
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I’m aware of 3D printers, but despite using the same term “printer” they’re a completely different class of peripheral with a separate purpose than imaging. Micro-printing is a neat gimmick, but not something available as a consumer PC peripheral or anything I’d ever want. YMMV.
On the plus side of progress, there are really reliable and fast laser printers that are really cheap now. They don’t do anything different than the ones from 15 years ago, but they’re cheaper, which is nice. I have a fairly new color ink jet that’s only noticeably different from one from 15 years ago in that it has an 802.11 interface, but it has the same problems that the ones from 15 years ago had (insanely expensive ink, heads clog, jet alignment goes out, etc.) and I hate it as much as I have always hated ink jets because there hasn’t been any real progress in making them not suck at the one thing they do that matters - printing, which is why I mostly use the laser printer.
