Epson 3800 and digital negatives
Title: Epson 3800 and digital negatives I spent a couple of days this
past weekend working with an Epson 3800.
The 3800 is definitely a great printer, very smooth printing and seems to be immune to the Venetian blind disease, at least when new. I was able to make an excellent negative of the type of scenes that severely challenges the 2200 and 2400, a high key scene with lots of large areas of even tones. Also, the 3800 gives a lot of UV blocking. The Green branch, more UV density than an equivalent RGB value on the 2200. Unfortunately, the Green branch on this particular printer I tested gave a very grainy look when the negative was printed in both Pt./Pd. and carbon. The best combination for smoothness was the Red branch, but there is some limitation on this road because the maximum possible Dmax was about 1.70. But this color prints very smoothly with little grain, much better than anything I have been able to get from the 2200. Also, printing a grayscale image in RGB using all of the inks gave fine grain and UV blocking of about 2.15, more than enough for pt./pd. but I saw some pizza wheel marks on Pictorico when printing black. Based on what I observed I am very impressed with the 3800, although the grainy look with some colors does limit somewhat our options. I am seriously thinking about buying the 3800, but have decided to also look at the 1400 before making a final decision. Sandy King
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