Epson ET-8550 Getting the best print quality. What matters the most for great prints?

hi my name is keith cooper from norflight images and in this short video i'm going to have a look at how you get your best print results from the epson et 8550 now i should say i've done quite a lot of videos detailed written review and lots of other things that look at specific aspects of using this printer such as making long prints for example so i'm not really going to go into the detail of that too much because i've covered it elsewhere this is about the general principles that you need to take if you want to get the best results out of this printer and the simplest way of doing it is when you start using the printer start off with a known paper so that means with an epson printer get some epson paper you don't have to get packs of big packs of paper you get some a4 or something like that but use paper that the printer was designed to use now that doesn't mean you can't use other papers far from it and i'll cover that in a moment but if you're unfamiliar with a printer start off with the epson paper first of all there'll be settings and profiles things to go with most epson papers certainly if you start off with something like pro luster paper or a glossy paper or something like that just to get the hang of actually of actually using it because epson supply profiles for some of their papers profiles are an important aspect of this now come back to that but essentially print using color profiles or if you're printing black and white use the abw black and white mode that is generally better than printing with profiles in almost every printer i've ever tested does very good black and white because this printer has a pigment black ink as well as a dye black ink these are used in different ways on different papers i've covered that elsewhere so i won't go into the details of it suffice to say it means you can get some very nice results on some art papers and glossy papers as well it's a dye based printer mostly as apart from that that black that's there there's a there's two blacks in this six colors fill them up from ink bottles that means one of the things about uh getting good prints is um practice and if you can your ink costs are much lower with something like this this is a printer you can just experiment with and i think that's why it's been popular and i've had an awful lot of people ask me about the 8550 about using it i mean it has a scanner in it as well which i've covered looking at that scanning artwork to print greeting cards and things like that talking of cards it prints greeting cards very well but for the best results make sure you use a card that is meant for inkjet media if you get just plain cardboard and try putting it through it yes you'll get a picture of some sort but it will likely be awful um you need to use media that is designed for use with the particular printer there are some papers you can get photo papers cheap photo papers etc that simply will not print well with it no matter what you do no matter what kit you've got to try and adjust things it's bad so start off with epson papers this was a canon printer i'd say start off with some canon papers it's that's the key to doing it um special media there are quite a few supported on this if you want to print stickers get a media that accepts aqueous inkjet use this is a water-based ink here and some vinyl stickers need solvent-based inks to work um if you don't get the proper pa of proper media so stickers in this case it simply won't work although i'm going to say stickers is not what i equate with high quality image printing i'm a photographer i'm not interested in speaking sticky labels other people are but it does work but make sure you get the right media i mentioned profiles earlier color management is a key aspect to getting good prints from this now it's easy to do i mean got a nice monitor here this thank you one here it's set up it's calibrated it's set to um actually very low color temperature so that it looks okay on the on the video but you need to edit and process your images now this image here was taken in amble on the northumberland coast at dusk unloading a trawler unloading fish there is a print of that image now it's unlikely to look the same here certainly doesn't look the same to me however that is an accurate print representing that image there be very careful about making the assumption that all you do is edit your image so it looks good on screen then press print the print and the screen are two different media they will always look different you cannot match the screen to the print or the print to the screen it doesn't work this picture here is visible to me and the camera by light being reflected off it coming in either through a window or from some lights here this has its own built-in light they are never going to look the same the absolute worst thing ever to do is just put a print up to a screen and try and compare it you're doomed to failure better far better way of doing it is to have the print under reasonable lighting look at the screen turn your head look at it various ways our visual system works means things get reset slightly when you move your head so that it's a much more accurate comparison of how the print looks to look at it like this and then look at the screen not look at the two together um simple tip there for you know getting better looking prints the screen though is not the final result if you're making prints it is the print that counts and it's always the print that that makes a difference now i mentioned profiles earlier profiles are used by printer software to allow for the different characteristics of papers if you use profiles then it gives you a better chance of getting more accurate and better looking color and once it gets it right it gives you a better chance of it looking right because it still depends on quite a lot of factors you can get these profiles epson will supply them for their own papers for some papers um there are a lot of paper manufacturers and here's where we look at third party papers and if i remember rightly probably all of these pictures here are on third party papers um good paper suppliers if you buy some paper off them they'll make profiles for you or they will have profiles now you need when you use the profiles you need to set the right media setting on the printer as well and with the 8550 because of the mixed ink set it means that media choice is absolutely critical in getting the best results particularly if you use the vfa fine art which is the fine art media setting on the printer it can give particularly good results on matte papers this is a black and white picture here looks excellent it's printed on an art paper works really well if you use profiles for color use the black and white mode for printing black and white get your media settings right that goes a long way towards getting things right an important thing as well as that once you when you're doing your testing and you get first get your printer i never test printers initially with a picture of my own no matter how well i know it i know some of these pictures very well but i don't use them for initial testing i always make the point of using a test image because test image has been created for testing printers and paper there's a color one there's a specialist black and white testing which i've created these are available for download on the norflight images website um so you can have a look at them this has black and white section in it as colors it has the download page has details about what all these different panels mean and what sort of faults in your printing they might show up but suffice to say if you can't print a good test image then what i hope you got for your own pictures not a lot um i use this as one of my first prints on any printer that i look at it gives a consistency as well because i know the image i know what to look for it's very helpful i'll also use it if i'm testing new papers and i've made a profile rather than test one of my own images which i will eventually i'll use one of these test images first some people say oh doesn't is that waste of paper in it well yes but you're gaining a bit of experience from it and wasting it not really not on this particular printer because you've got these ink bottles that you just fill up with bottles and it works out appreciably cheaper than some of the other printers i've looked at with the cartridges in them so that's printing our image what about that image how am i printing it well the example i've got here on the screen is using epson print layout now this is running connected up to a mac macbook pro but it works on pc as well this epson software is particularly good at handling printing now i heard some people said it had problems installing this and getting it to recognize the printer one of the things i would say is make sure that your firmware is up to date on the printer there is a in the settings here in maintenance uh an option to check for firmware updates there's no reason not to install the updates it's a relatively new printer there will be firmware updates uh they do come regularly in the life of a printer but more so at the start um they don't necessarily tell you what they're changing but they're meant to make things more reliable and i'm told that support for the epson print layer or compatibility with it is improved now this is a useful bit of software um i've used it in loads of my reviews so if you're looking at the epson print layout don't just look at videos that i've done for the 8550 look at ones for the epson p700 and the epson p900 as well because i've used this same software so it's this software and there's a border here that i've used for this borderless print on this glossy paper and it comes out very nicely likewise i used the black and white print mode for printing out that one there the steps at wells cathedral going up to the chapter house um it's quite a famous location um but i just wanted to try it with a slightly different lens so it's one that i use a lot i know that image i know the tonality and the stone work so i can print that and i pretty well know that whether a print or paper is working well although i'll still use the test image first that in a way has become one of my test images just because i use it a lot but see it's excellent it's free software i download it uh you may need to hunt around because the links seem to have failed certainly on the epson uk site i think on the epson us site it's available you can download it it allows you to set things like custom paper sizes as well as all kinds of bits and pieces it's not terribly difficult to work with there are videos supporting it epson have got quite good documentation for the software it's great for this all you need to do is open this load up an image which is what i've done here i've taken the image that this was printed from and just loaded it into this so you see it's got a border but you don't have to have the borders for some paper sizes so got that set up what about those images well you could print directly i use photoshop a lot i have done for many years so i know photoshop inside out you could use lightroom you could use dxo or even um ac dc i believe supports color affinity photo uh sorry if that's a nice cheap bit of software to get into printing and and how editing your images before you print them because you do need probably to do some form of editing on your images before you print them um if you are just trying to print images straight from your phone direct to a printer like this then that doesn't mean you can't get some great looking photos because of the content of the photos but from a technical point of view um you're simply not bothering um i i've not seen a photo printed directly from a phone to a printer like this that couldn't have been improved by transferring the photo onto a computer making a few slight adjustments then printing it even if it's contrast color brightness white balance all kinds of things like that phones are phones they are great they take photos you might get a photo that's very meaningful to you but you can still have a photo that means a lot to you but it's still a rubbish print and i'm talking here not about the you know the worth of the picture to you but from a technical point of view is it a great print um the two interchanged somewhat so you always need to do some of that anyway that's the gist of getting great prints from a printer like this um i can comfortably say i can make very nice looking prints now if you want to put your prints if you want to sell them if you want to put if you're bothered about the archival properties then maybe you want to look at a pigment ink printer more expensive more expensive inks but if you want to make great looking prints experiment yes your paper will cost you a bit but with the ink tanks in this it's relatively cheap but the one bit i would remember to say right at the end is that a rubbish photo will always make a rubbish print this is the bit people don't want to have i have not printed a duff photo on this printer that wasn't my fault and that i'm sure goes for everyone else whether they're happy to admit it or not printer like this gives you a great opportunity to improve your printing it also gives a great opportunity to discover that actually your problem wasn't necessarily your printing skills it was your basic photography skills now that is an entirely different story i have looked at it elsewhere and printing will help but remember rubbish photo rubbish print is up to you i hope that's been of some use please do feel free to subscribe to the channel if you find it useful um i'm trying to put together general things like this uh various aspects of photography so uh thank you very much you

Channel: Keith Cooper

Views: 2,129

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Id: 2udCwq0GQX0

Length: 16min 23sec (983 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 13 2021