Hp B9180

[John_Nevill]

After the trials and tribulations of my Epson 2100 clogging problem, which is now looking very much like a print head fault (burnt out?) with an associated repair cost of ~£200, I decided to order a HP B9180.

I stated in an earlier post that i've stuck with Epson printers for many years, so this departure is real trek into the unknown. I've read a fair few reviews on the HP and a friend of mine got one a month back and the output looks superb.

Hopefully mine will be here early next week, so i'll pass on my impressions in due course!

Why did I go for the HP?

Well, the TCO is lower, it has user changeable printheads, it re-maps clogged nozzles, it supposedly has the best lightfastness on the market, its pretty fast at output and it was significantly cheaper than the R2400. (I paid £380 for it) Plus, I'm not ready for A2 printing yet.

The downside is, the ink and paper are currently difficult to get hold of, but I have a truck load of Lyson paper and a spectrocolorimeter.

I have heard that Lyson paper is sourced from the same suppler as HP, but i'll endeavour to spend sometime building some custom profiles for it.

I intended to move the Epson 2100 into B/W duty but decided to put it on the home network and let my lads use it for college work (documents etc). Now the 2100 is fitted with a CIS, it should prove economical for their use.

If anyone has any first hand info on the HP B9180, then feel free to let me know your thoughts!

 

[Asher Kelman]

Well, John, sooner or later, people are going to question Epson's currently held status as "the" superior printer for fine art photographers. You are correct. More and more photograpphers have jumped ship. HP has a lot to offer. The built in spectrophotometer is a definite plus. I have heard raves about the color. I wouldn't worry too much about the papers as this is already a known issue and people have overcome it. No doubt that gap will be shortly filled. I'd look into the RIPS and see what papers they have profiles, although that's an expense and you already know how to profile paper it seems.

Well good luck on your new journey. Could you print for yourself some prints you already made on the Epson? It would be a great quicke comparison.

Asher

 

[John_Nevill]

The HP B9180 arrived tonight, 60 mins later it was unpacked, close calibrated and ready to print.
I never heard so much clanking and grinding from a printer before, it really doesn't sound healthy at all, but it passed all the checks with all nozzles firing ok. Although ink levels dropped to 70%.

HP don't exactly excel themselves with free paper samples, you get 12 sheets of A4 gloss and 5 are used for calibration.

I ran a few glossy prints direct from CS2 via the HP plugin and my first impression was "very neutral". No eye popping colours, no punch, no cast, just very neutral. The print quality in terms of ink on paper was exceptional, the full gloss output looks like a wet print, no gloss differential or bronzing. Personally. I'd prefer a little bit more saturation.

I then trawled the net for some default settings for other papers, namely Ilford Gallerie Smooth Pearl. This is a reasonably priced paper and I've used it a lot. The user recommended settings suggest a "soft gloss" profile and I printed off a few A4s, again very neutral, but still a little low in saturation.
Next up was the Lyson Pro Satin. I had no idea what profile to use, so I decided to stick with the soft gloss. The results suggested that I really need to build a custom profile, the colours were a little muddy and image seemed to look dirty. So thats the next challenge!.

Hopefully, the PrintFix Pro with new v2 software will do a good job. If so then i'll reprofile the other papers to bring the saturation to my liking. e.g. what my calbrated eizo renders at 120cdm.

I suppose the biggest benefit is the printer drivers themselves, I use Silkypix and its very much limited on printer output, you get sRGB or AdobeRGB, but no paper profile support. The HP drivers gets round this by enabling you to select the input colorspace as AdobeRGB and then it manages the conversion to the selected paper profile. The ouput was very good, but again it lack saturation.

Finally, I also managed to print using Qimage, just set the HP9180 to "application managed colour" and select the relevant profile in the Qimage dialogue.

So to summarise, very good quality output, prints defintely looks better than the Epson 2100, re smootheness of ink on paper sense, but it will need tweaking! I also expected it to be significantly faster than the 2100, but from hitting the go button to getting a delivered print it only seemed about 20% faster.

I'll hopefully pass on my custom profile adventure shortly, Now to print a few targets. let them dry and start the measuring process!

 

[Jim Davies]

John
Nice to see you got your new printer


Jim

 

[Asher Kelman]

John,

Is this a pigment ink printer? If so the light fastness seems very short!

asher

 

[John_Nevill]

Asher, I believe the lightfastness of the Vivera inks is quoted as 200 years!

Btw, As I now have quite a bit Lyson paper stock (Pro Satin, Pro Gloss and Matte), I decided to set about profiling the Vivera inkset for this media. I used the 225 patch set plus extended greys and have been very impressed with the output.

I personally find that the Vivera inkset less vibrant (better than the saturated term I used earlier) than say the Lyson cave paint on the 2100, however the HP stock profiles dont give this impression when soft proofing in CS2 on a calibrated Eizo. The screen looks vibrant but the output is less so.

Having now profiled the Lyson Pro Satin on the Vivera inkset, the soft proof and output are now almost identical but equally less vibrant, but photorealistic nonetheless. There's a very slight matte effect on a lower mid tone browns, possibly due to the mixture of MK an PK being used. But I also see this on other satin papers.

I also noticed that the PFPv2 gamut for the Lyson paper is wider on the blue but marginally less on the green.

So this experience tells me that the PFPv2 really does actually resolve lot of problems an concerns previously encountered but other users.

Next up is the Lyson Pro Gloss!

 

[Joseph Ferrari]

I've had mine about a month now and the only complaint is the noise level, HP recommends leaving the printer on at all times and the printer does its thing every 30 seconds or so.

 

[Asher Kelman]

John and Joseph,

Is the sound loud enough that if it was in a spare room near bedrooms, one's sleep would be disturbed? IOW, keeping it on with it "doing its thing" every 20 minutes, does the noise transmit through the walls!

Asher

 

[John_Nevill]

Hi Asher,

I've left mine on since originally plugged in. Yep its noisey, lots of clicking, grinding and pump sounds. If left unused, it seems to settle down to a service routine about once day (relative to when it was plugged in). So for me its 11:00pm everynight. The first time it happened it made me jump! I would say its very noisey by Epson standards.

BTW, I've since profiled a few more Lyson papers and also noticed that Ilford have released profiles for five of their galerie range here.

 

[Joseph Ferrari]

John and Joseph,

Is the sound loud enough that if it was in a spare room near bedrooms, one's sleep would be disturbed? IOW, keeping it on with it "doing its thing" every 20 minutes, does the noise transmit through the walls!

Asher

My studio (multimedia), a 12x12 room, is completely soundproof; its part of a 12x36—with the door open to my studio, I can hear the whir of the B9180 from the other end of the 12x36 space.

But you can get reprieve from this when a system—laptop or desktop—are active and have the HP drivers installed. When a system is active, the printer whir is infrequent and the whir is much softer.

Also, that the printer is networkable out of the box, you can relocate to a more issolated area.

I guess the crucial question is: is it worth it?

One of my experiences with the Epson 1280 was inconsistency of output—I haven't got that from the B9180.

Recently I covered a 30th birthday party—Canon 5D with the 50mm f.4, 85mm f1.8, 135mm f2.)—the 13x19 enlargements from this shoot said: the B9180 was a good choice.

Hope this helps.