Used in a professional studio

Author's Rating:

Pros: True to life color.  Fast printing.

Cons: Ink tanks are too small. B&W prints ok.

The Bottom Line: 
Professional image results but expensive per page printing.

Author's Review
I have been using an Epson R1900 printer in my professional photography studio for the last 10 months.  I have found that the unit performs as advertised. 

The colors are rich, deep, and accurate once you have your monitor correctly calibrated.  The printer uses two black inks, one for photo and one for matte papers.  There is also a gloss optimizer cartridge which provides a beautiful clean finish for glossy prints. 

This printer is being used as a photo greeting card printer and on average prints over 1500 cards per month, running almost non stop.  I have not experienced any issues using a heavy glossy stock.

The printer can handle a heavy workload and produces similar if not identical output for each print.  I originally intended this printer for only gloss based papers but have found it works extremely well with specialty papers, such as: rag, cotton, canvas, cordovan, etc.

There have been issues with some of the ink cartridges not being recognized by the printer.  These are factory sealed, new Epson cartridges.  This issue has been listed in a forum on Epson's website and they have provided a work around solution.  I found the solution to not be effective and at one point was looking at returning the unit.  I experienced this problem in the first quarter of 2009.  Since then, the new cartridges have not caused this issue and the problem now seems to be resolved at the factory.

The cost per page is higher than I originally estimated.  This is not a fault of Epson but of my own and highly caution any user that is going to use this printer for commercial work to estimate on the higher side of printing cost.

The black and white outputs for prints is less than desirable.  This again is not what I would call a fault with Epson.  This unit was being advertised in many professional trade magazines as being an excellent color printer but when it came to B&W prints, they were recommending one of their more expensive units (Epson 3800). 

The ink cartridge size needs to be fixed in my opinion.  The tanks contain far too little ink for this printer to be considered for anything more than a home user printer.  The output of the printer is professional grade and I have had several prints from this printer sell for over $200 each.  However, replacing cartridges 5-10 times during a standard print run of 500 greeting cards is tiresome and expensive.

The cleaning system that is built into the printer utilizes Epson's GUI software which runs flawlessly on a 32 bit or 64 bit OS.  I have tested the software with:  Windows Vista 32, Vista 64, and finally Windows 7 professional 64 bit.  I have not had any complaints and the software has a small memory footprint and low CPU usage. 

The ink tank size can be resolved by using third party CIS (Continous Ink Systems) but that is for another review and I strongly encourage doing a lot of research before considering this option.

I would like to see this unit be upgraded to a larger tank system in the future.  The output quality puts this printer in the professional catergory but the ink tank size puts the printer in the home user caterogry.  Hopefully Epson will resolve this issue.  With the intial sticker price, you would expect the ink tanks to be larger and more efficient.