Epson SureColor P405 Retrospective

So: in the 90s I wrangled printers for a living. I spent some years in a pre-press bureau doing proofing and film output for design companies, back when Saatchi and Saatchi still had a big office in Wellington, and when colour printing of any quality meant a $50k A3 dye sublimation printer, or a colour laser copier that had an expansion board and an SGI workstation acting as a PostScript interpreter hooked up to it.

My life at that point was a 15 minute cycle courier dropping off a SyQuest removable hard drive from Colenso or Saatchi or Cactus or whoever, and then coaxing the FreeHand or Quark or whatever job they'd given us into something that they could use to get client sign-off. It was back before the web existed in a meaningful way, so when the files shat the bed - "rich blacks" that overloaded a colour laser to the point that the combined weight of C, M, Y, and K turned into a kind of plastic goo that looked like a toon being melted from Roger Rabbit, or pages of PostScript errors from a memory blowout - it was poking around files or asking around the small office for tips.

When I left that job the next one was supporting the computers that were used for printing, so more of the same, just from a different part of the chain.

Which is to say I spent my 20s as a professional printer-toucher, and I know quite a bit about it. So if I think a printer is terrible to use, I don't mean it in the sense of "I bought a twenty dollar Lexmark and I have regrets". I mean it from the perspective of "I am capable of hand-tweaking PostScript files to make them work and this is still garbage".

The Good

Look, the image quality is in fact beautiful. The hyper expensive inks - normal for this class of printer - are great, the output when you can get it is everything you could want. I have more than a few prints about the place, and they are everything one might hope for.

The Bad: Everything Else

The problem is the pain in getting there. "Time to print an 8x10: 2 minutes" more like 2 hours and two minutes. And the problem is two tightly interlinked items: the paper handling and the terrible, terrible software.

Paper handling in this class of printer is a big deal. Entry/consumer-level photo printers are either single paper (cheap dye sublimation printers from Fujifilm, Canon, Kodak, etc) that you buy in a pack or take a narrow range of glossy and maybe a few matt papers (Canon, Epson, Brother, etc). Once you get into the "pro" printers you're paying for a few things: colour reproduction being accurate, inks that have a long life; both of these the SureColor did well. But paper is another huge part of it. You want to be able to work with different weights and textures of paper to create a specific look; you want to work with different sizes and weights; you want papers that are acid-free so that your prints don't eat themselves while the ink fades. Above all though, and this is why you would bother to spend money on this class of printer, rather than chuck a USB stick at your local big box store: because you want to run out sizes and formats and textures that you can't get there.

And this is where the Epson is a terrible failure.

The first problem is profiles: some photo printer makers support a wide range of paper profiles, including from third-party paper makers like Ilford, that make it easy to get the printing right for the paper type. This is harder than you might think: different papers can handle different levels of ink saturation. Some need a gloss coating to get their best effects. Some have coatings that help the inks pop, others need different levels of ink for the effect that you want. This is a big part of the magic of this kind of print making.

Not only do Epson not support other manufacturers' profiles, they don't even support their own. Pick up an official Epson set of papers, and you'll quickly discover that there's no "matt cold press" setting in the Epson software, you need to go look up which of the settings map to your paper. Your official Epson paper. If you want any other papers? Good luck.

But wait, it gets worse: the P405, for example, has four different paths to print things, four different ways to put stuff into it. Each of those paths is designed to accomodate different media: different weights of paper, different thickness, roll vs cut sheet, discs, whatever. So you'd think, wouldn't you, that Epson would make it easy to understand what media goes where, and if you've stuck it in the wrong slot, make it easy to work out where to put it instead.

Lol.

In fact, the terrible software, not content with making it a puzzle as to how to get the right paper, now makes a complete mystery as to where to put it. Over the time I've owned the P405 the software has been inconsistent between iPad, Windows, and MacOS editions, and versions, as to what the different feeds are labelled, and those labels haven't lined up with the manual. And if the printer has a jam, or the wrong thickness of paper is on the wrong path, or the wrong weight of paper is used, or literally any other paper-related error, the response is the same: an LED lights up and blinks, and the status returns "there is an error please check the printer".

That's it.

So off you go to load and unload the paper in the various feeds until eventually one may (or may not) print, depending on whether you cleared it correctly and when you inserted it and sometimes for reasons I've never managed to divine. Which means that if all you need it to do is rip through consumer-grade printing - vanilla 6x4 or 5x7 - it's as easy as using a printer that costs a quarter as much, but when you ask it to do the job you paid for it's possible to spend the better part of a day and still end up with nothing much you want to show anyone else because the other problem is that even after you've got all that right there's the odd time that you'll have odd banding that requires a full cleaning and calibration to mostly fix.

In Conclusion

The Epson SureColor P405 is not only the worst printer purchase that I've ever made, it's also the worst photography purchase as well. The bliss of producing prints that I am proud of has been punctuated by frustration that I had left behind in the days of sending rolls of film to a lab and finding they've ruined my honeymoon pics.

Epson have failed me for the last time, and I will not be going back to them for my print making needs; rather I will be ordering from a competitor. Perhaps Epson's newer models fix some of these problems, but I am not about to take that gamble, and I'd recommend that no-one else does, either.