It’s been a busy week with new arrivals. My Epson 2100 died a few months ago with a clogged magenta channel, no amount of cleaning would restore it so I finally bit the bullet and ordered an R3000. I was sorely tempted by a 3880 but I don’t really do enough printing to justify such a large printer. The R3000 seemed to be what I needed, basically a baby 3880.

Once I managed to get it home, the process of setting it up remained. The old printer went into its box, I vacuumed up half a ton of dust which had gathered around it. I also took the opportunity to install a Blu-ray burner for backing up files, and put away an old PC which I had left lying in backup next to the new one. The new printer was trussed up in travel tape to prevent various parts from flapping around. I installed the 9 ink cartridges and it automatically primed itself in a 10 min performance of Cage’s lesser known work. Drivers were installed and we were ready to go.

Now was the problem of what to print first. The methodical thing to do would be print out something I was familiar with so that I could compare it with a previous print. Of course I didn’t do this but chose something new. I’d been starved of a printer for so long I wanted to see what it could do with one of the images which was piling up. I chose a night scene I took of the Canal du Midi at Homps. The print on Ilford Galerie Smooth Pearl was pretty good, the density in the dark areas much better than what I had been getting with the 2100. The colours also seemed to be suitably saturated.

I then tried profiling the printer for Tetenal Duo Print 130gsm using SpyderPrint 4.2.3. The problem is using the right media settings, the plain paper settings didn’t really give a satisfactory result so I may have to experiment. Switching to matte black may also help (but I don’t want to waste ink, not yet).

Doing some large prints of panos will be the next test. I will try the Ilford Galerie Smooth Pearl HDR version see if this gives a better result.