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Epson Stylus Pro 3880 Inkjet Printer (CA61201-VM)
Review by David Em Epson Electronics ISBN/ITEM#: B002PLQ7LI Date: 14 January 2010 List Price $1,295.00 Amazon US / Amazon UK Links: Epson Home Page / Show Official Info /
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A big difference between the 4880 and the 3880 is build quality. Put simply, the 4880's built like a tank, and the 3880 is not. If you run a business that cranks prints out around the clock, you need a production machine like the 4880 that can handle the stress. But if you're an artist, designer, or photographer producing a few prints a day, the 3880 outperforms the 4880 in several ways.
DESIGN AND SETUP
The Stylus 3880's overall design is outstanding. The printer supports paper sizes up to 17-inches x 22-inches, yet its physical dimensions measure a mere 27-inches x 15-inches x 10-inches (WxDxH), so it can easily fit on a small work table, an impressive engineering accomplishment. Just as remarkable, it weighs in at forty-three pounds, less than half the weight of the 4880, making it easy to handle by one person.
My only beef on the construction is that some elements feel a little plasticky compared to other Epson printers that carry the "Pro" labeling. The paper alignment mechanism and the front pullout printer catch tray feel flimsy and could break if not handled with care.
Installing the ink cartridges was literally a snap. There are nine 80ml ink cartridges (two Cyans, two Magentas, Yellow, two Grays, and Two Blacks). Once the inks are in place, the printer charges up and you're good to go. You can hook the printer up via either USB 2.0 or 10/100 Base T Ethernet. The entire setup process including loading the driver took me less than an hour.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Once everything was humming, I took the 3880 for a spin. I loaded several 17-inch x 22-inch sheets of Epson's Ultra Premium Photo Luster paper in the sheet feeder and printed a set of photographs and art images I use as my standard imaging test bed. I was knocked out by the results: I've never been able to achieve this level of color accuracy from a new printer right off the bat. Usually I have to run several proofs of each image before I get results I feel are satisfactory.
Perhaps everything went so smoothly simply because I've been testing printers for years and have tweaked these images to within an inch of their lives, but I think it's more than that. When I tested Epson's Stylus Pro 7900 last year, I had a devil of a time calibrating overall exposure levels, and had to resort to adjusting the pictures in Photoshop before I got acceptable results. The final prints were stupendous - but they required a tremendous amount of extra work.
THE PROCESS
The printer's environmental impact is minimal. It runs very quietly, in contrast to some I've tested that had to be placed in a separate room because they made such a racket. It produces no irksome fumes, and I experienced no messy leakages handling the ink cartridges. It's a quiet and clean machine.
The 3880 has three separate paper paths. Lighter weight papers use the top-loading sheet tray, thicker papers go through a rear paper path one sheet at a time, and cardboard-type media up to 1.5mm thick are accommodated with a front straight-through manual feed. Surprisingly, Epson's not provided the 3880 with a roll feed mechanism, a feature that would be very attractive to the typical purchaser of this class of printer.
In addition to the Ultra Premium Photo Luster photo paper, I tested the 3880 with Epson' UltraSmooth Fine Art paper and their brand new Hot and Cold Press Bright and Natural papers. A 16-inch x 20-inch print takes about a quarter of an hour to print at maximum 2880 x 1440 dpi resolution. Again, the results were almost uniformly outstanding.
THE INKS
Ink usage is more efficient in this model than previous ones. Ink levels on related models such as the 3800 and the R2400 vary considerably from one ink to another. Often a single color such as the Light Magenta or Light Black is used at twice the rate as the other colors, but in the case of the 3880, overall ink distribution appears to be much more consistent. Of course your mileage will vary depending on the specific images you print.
One ink issue Epson has yet to resolve satisfactorily is that both their Photo Black and Matte Black inks use the same printhead, meaning you have to flush the line every time you switch between using Photo papers (gloss and luster surfaces) and Fine Art papers (matte surfaces). While an improvement over previous models such as the 4880 that require you to physically swap out one black cartridge for the other, performing the switch still costs time and money, since ink is wasted every time the system cleans the line to switch between inks. On the plus side, the print heads use a new ink-repellent coating to reduce clogging.
This black switching problem persists in Epson's large format x900 series printers as well, however the worthy competition at Hewlett-Packard and Canon have solved the problem on their larger printers, a difference that's serious enough in a production environment to weight a purchasing decision toward one manufacturer over another.
PAPER HANDLING
I had very few problems with paper handling, although I had to reload thick sheets of paper in the rear paper path from time to time. Unlike some earlier Epson models, this was never a big deal. Instead of releasing a hung up sheet by moving the paper forward through the printer's paper path, the 3880 backs up the paper, making it easy to reload. I never had a real paper jam.
The first time I switched from Photo Black to Matte Black ink, the printheads caught on the left and right edges of the paper causing ink streaking, but that anomaly never recurred, even with heavier papers. I had some centering issues with certain paper sizes (but not others - go figure) where I had to manually adjust the center of the paper layout in the driver.
COLOR AND TONE
The detail of the printed images is excellent, but that's to be expected, since the output offered by photo-quality printers has for several years exceeded what the human eye can resolve. However the printheads' extremely precise placement of 3.5 picoliter droplets yields exceptionally smooth color and tone transitions.
According to Epson, the pairing of the 3880's printhead technology with the RIT Munsell Color Science Lab's AccuPhoto HD2 image screening architecture creates a wider color gamut, better highlight and shadow detail, and reduces the perception of metamerism (an undesirable effect in black and white images that causes them to shift color in different lighting conditions, often to a sickly green).
When the company introduced its first archival pigment ink desktop inkjet printer, the Stylus 2000P, in 1998, it ignited a revolution that would eventually displace impermanent dye-based inkjet printing for the creative community. But the color and tone results of that early model were a far cry from what the fourth-generation 3880 produces.
Judging an image's overall aesthetic quality is necessarily subjective, but I am very impressed with the hues the printer produces. The 2000P produced only dark reds, flat blues, a limited tonal range, and serious metamerism. By contrast, the 3880 delivers lush reds and deep blues, plus violets, and greens that are typically hard to hit, and a wide distribution of black and white tone values that shift only minimally in different lighting conditions.
WRAP
The printer's sold in two versions, the $1,295 Standard Edition, and the $1,495 Graphic Arts Edition that includes a Pantone-licensed ColorBurst RIP that supports coated and uncoated spot color matching. It runs under 32-bit and 64-bit Windows from XP forward, and Mac OS X 10.4.11 and above. The 80ml ink cartridges cost about $60 apiece.
The Stylus Pro 3880 represents the state of the art in professional-quality desktop printing. Its combination of compact form factor, affordable price, wide color gamut, and tone range are unsurpassed in its class. If you're in the market for a digital darkroom printer that produces stunning 17-inch x 22-inch color and black and white prints that will last over a century, this printer should be at the top of your list. Highly Recommended.
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