Epson Expression Photo HD XP15000
never say dye? pigment inks are strictly off the menu in epson’s new A3+ large-format photo printer. Matthew Richards puts it to the test
matthew richards tests epson’s new a3+ largeformat photo printer
Epson has a long and illustrious history in manufacturing six-ink photo printers. The time-honoured approach is to add light or ‘photo’ cyan and magenta inks to the usual CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) line-up. The resulting extension in gamut is a better fit for photo printing. In recent years, we’ve seen five-ink printers from Epson, following Canon’s lead of combining CMYK dye-based inks with an additional pigment black ink, for effective document and photo printing from a single device. The new XP-15000 bucks both trends.
As an A3+ printer, the Epson is capable of producing 19x13in borderless output. It’s a six- ink printer, but the six inks are not what you might expect. CMYK dye-based inks are still at the core, but the two additions are dye-based grey and red inks. The grey ink is intended to improve the quality of black & white photo printing, while the red ink promises to extend the colour range and enable more vivid colour reproduction.
Many photographers prefer pigment-based inks for largeformat inkjet printing, as they tend to be more resistant to fading over the decades, especially if the prints are going to be hung on a wall. The flip side is that pigment-based inkjets like the Epson SureColor P600 (£530) fail to give super-smooth output on glossy photo paper. It’s simply because the larger molecules of pigment ink are too big to be fully absorbed beneath the topmost, shiny surface of glossy photo paper. In terms of longevity, the Claria Photo HD dye-based inks are nevertheless rated at 200-300 years if photo prints are stored in an album, and almost a century when framed behind glass. It’s also worth noting that prints created with dye-based inks are more resistant to scratches and scrapes than pigment-based prints.
All things considered, the new XP-15000 is better for glossy photo printing and is up against competition from the likes of the Canon Pixma Pro-100S (£340), as well as Epson’s own Expression Photo XP-960 (£200). The latter has a slightly smaller maximum print size of A3 (16.5x11.7in) but adds a built-in A4 scanner, memory card slot
and 4.3-in touchscreen, instead of a smaller 2.4-in screen with no touch-sensitivity. The XP-960 also has a more conventional range of six dye-based inks, whereas the Canon Pro-100S bumps up the range to eight dye inks, including the conventional six-pack, plus grey and light grey inks for enhanced mono photo printing.
It’s a lightweight
The Epson XP-15000 is unusually compact and lightweight for an A3+ printer. It’s actually less than half the weight of the competing Canon Pro 100S and, while the Epson doesn’t have such an industrial, heavy- duty feel to it, build quality certainly isn’t flimsy. The input and output trays, buttons and switches all have a good- quality feel to them and operate smoothly and effectively.
The input tray at the front can accept paper sizes up to A4, with a capacity of 200 to 250 plain paper sheets, depending on thickness. The rear feeder accommodates larger paper sizes of up to A3+ as well as thicker specialist media. You can also print directly onto white-faced CDs, DVDs and Blu- Ray discs.
The print head is based on Epson’s long-standing Micro Piezo technology, enabling a maximum resolution of 5,760x1,440dpi, with a minimum droplet size of 1.5pl (picolitre), which is typical for Epson printers.
Well connected, the printer has USB, Ethernet, Wi- Fi and Wi- Fi Direct interfaces built in. The last of these enables wireless linking to compatible devices without using a Wi- Fi router. Apple AirPrint and Google Cloud Print are supported, while Epson’s free apps such as Creative Print and Email Print enable you to print photos directly from Facebook or via email from pretty much anywhere in the world. As such, the printer can switch on automatically and extend its output tray when it receives a print job.
Quality, speed and cost
By default, ‘automatic photo enhancements’ are applied when printing photos. This has long been standard practice for Epson, and it can be a mixed blessing. For example, the additional red ink cartridges enable an attractive warmth in skin tones, but this is largely stripped out when using the auto or ‘people’ enhancement setting. Meanwhile, landscape images can take on a rather lurid appearance, with inky blue skies that can become oversaturated and artificial.
Ultimately, the range of enhancements on offer are only really worth using if you’re printing photo images direct from your camera; they might otherwise look a bit bland. If you take the trouble of editing your photos before printing, you’ll get much better and more consistent results by turning off corrections
‘ The additional grey cartridge helps to give smoother tonal graduations’
altogether. Colour quality then becomes impressively accurate on the whole, although the overall gamut or colour space isn’t better than that from a conventional six-ink photo printer with a more traditional ink line- up.
For black & white photo printing, the additional grey cartridge helps to give smoother tonal graduations. The dedicated ‘Black and White Photo’ mode locks the printer in its high- quality setting and helps avoid the magenta colour cast that we noticed in regular colour mode. Even so, mono photo quality doesn’t quite have the fidelity of the competing Canon Pro 100S printer.
Dye-based inkjet printers are typically faster than their pigmentbased counterparts. The XP15000 is no slouch, turning out A4 and A3+ borderless prints at its standard photo quality setting in 1min 47sec and 3min 30sec, respectively. In high- quality mode, the speed drops to 3min 7sec for A4 and 6min 2sec for A3+. That’s about 40% slower than the Canon Pro 100S, but if you’re creating quality prints to last a lifetime, an extra minute or 90 seconds isn’t long to wait.
Running costs are, frankly, a bit disappointing. Like many recent Epson and Canon printers, the XP-15000 gives you the option to buy standard or ‘ XL’ high- capacity replacement cartridges. The exact amount of ink varies between colours, but even the XL cartridges average out to 10ml, which is a bit low for A3+ printing. Suffice to say, you’ll need to replace the cartridges often if you regularly create A3+ prints, and they’re not cheap either.
The average cost of an XL cartridge is £19, so the price per millilitre works out to £1.80. That’s pricier than the £1.44 per ml of the XP-960’s ink, and more than twice the price of ink for the Canon Pixma Pro 100S, which comes in 13ml cartridges at a cost of 85p per ml. To make matters worse, the printer is sold with ‘setup cartridges’ which, in our tests, started running out after as few as 14 A4 and six A3+ photo prints.