Printer Proves Appearance Is Everything

Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday August 28, 1996

By MARK CAMM

Epson Stylus Pro XL+

Colour inkjet printer (for Windows 3.x, Windows 95 and Macintosh)

$3,000

Black ink cartridge $40

Colour ink cartridge $85

*****

THIS printer will put you on a learning curve so steep you'll think Mount Everest is a mere foothill. But this is one of those strange, very strange, situations where everything appears to share an inverse relationship with everything else.

The Epson Stylus Pro XL+ couldn't be easier to use. You unpack it, plug it in, load it with paper, install the printer software, and print. That's about as much as it takes. Where the learning curve and grappling irons come in is with making the very most of the very best printer I've ever used.

First, though, let me tell you what it isn't very good at, and that's as a high-volume text printer. Here, even a bottom-end laser will out perform the Pro XL+, and look better on ordinary paper. As well, it chews though the black inkjet cartridges at a fairly alarming rate.

But you will struggle to find a colour inkjet printer for the price that comes even remotely close to matching it for colour and photographic-quality output, especially when it comes to graphics and desktop publishing. The bonus with the Pro XL+ is that you are not restricted to A4-size paper. It will handle everything up to A3, the size of a single tabloid page.

With other colour inkjet printers you'll look at the output and think, oh yeah, that's good. But it won't cross your mind to think it can do better. The XL Pro+ can, and when you realise that, you'll go to great lengths to get the best images you can to print, because you'll know that the printer will be able to match your higher expectations.

It was only two years ago that I had for some time a top-end Hewlett Packard colour printer that cost then about $2,000 more than the Stylus, but wasn't then even half as good as the XL Pro+ is now. It doesn't necessarily show that the Hewlett Packard was poor, more that the XL Pro+, and its software, proves how far printer technology has come in a few short years.

What the printer will do has a lot of "ifs" attached to it, and they have nothing to do with the printer itself.

* If you use imaging programs such as Adobe Photoshop or Corel Draw, you will want to spend hours calibrating the software, particularly the colour matching, so that what you see on the screen you'll see in the printed output, pixel for pixel, colour for colour, detail for detail.

* If you have only ever used photocopying paper to print your colour jobs on, with the XL Pro+ you'll want to use papers designed especially for it, high-quality paper for specific jobs - 360dpi paper, 720dpi paper, high-quality glossy paper, and on and on the list of special papers goes.

Why? Because the better the paper the better the printed result. Even on special coated paper for 720dpi printing you can get results that look as good as anything that might come off a high-quality press. With high-quality glossy paper you will get results that are as good (well, to my eye they are). Just using plain photocopying paper achieves results that will make you very happy.

* If you ever thought that appearance wasn't everything, you'll try the XL Pro+ and change your mind. Appearance will become everything.

* If you never cared about highlights, midtones and shadows, you will now. If you never worried about just how cyan, magenta, yellow and black, or red, green and blue, affect the printed output, you will.

The XL Pro+ is not a printer for approximate printing of colours or approximate printing of the image on the screen. It's for the precise printing of these values, as precise as you want them.

Theoretically, if you have a full setup (colour scanner, SVGA monitor with a video card capable of handling millions of colours and quality imaging software) you will be able to achieve, as near as damn-it, a perfect reproduction of the original image.

From business people wanting the very best for computer-generated and displayed presentations to those of you whose job it is to prepare artwork for printing, especially when it involves completed final proofs, this printer will stun you. I can't quite find it in my heart to recommend it to home users purely because of the price. For these people, the Epson Stylus Color 500, the $700 budget-priced version of the Pro XL+, would be a fair and happy compromise.

I can tell you from experience that the Pro XL+ does produce to the same quality the sorts of sample images Epson has been sending to anyone who has asked. If the Color 500 samples produced by Epson can be reproduced at home, then it's not as far behind the Pro XL+ as the price difference might suggest.

I've produced artwork and photos with the Pro XL+ - by way of Photoshop and the very necessary power of Pentium 166-powered PC with 32Mb of memory - that are worth framing. You might argue about my artistic talent, but not about the printed results.

Three thousand dollars is a lot to pay for a printer, but it's much less than a high-end colour laser printer, which would be my preferred choice. Why spend $5,000 on a classy PC, $1,000 on a good scanner, $1,200 on Photoshop and then kill it all with a cheap colour inkjet that will leave you disappointed.

It'd be like buying a Porsche and then hand painting it with No Brand house paint. Sometimes you have to spend the big bucks. Compromise isn't always possible, or wise.

* The Northern Herald's test Beam 2000 Pentium 166 is supplied by Beam Computers and Peripherals, 6 Boundary Road, Northmead 2152. Ph (02) 9890 1704 or fax (02) 9890 1513.