In a word, frugal.

One of the claims made by Epson for its ET-8550 ink tank printer is that is uses ink frugally.

Here are some data from my early experience. Bear in mind that about 1/4 of each ink bottle is used to fill the feed tubes and print heads when the printer is new, so the actual ink use is even lower, and I allow for that in my calculations.

110 prints made from new.

All prints made have been 13″x19″ in size. In practice I made 31 monochrome prints, not 3 as shown, as I now output them from Lightroom as ‘color’ originals which have been converted to B&W. Epson counts those as ‘Color’ as it cannot tell the difference.

Here are the ink levels after those 110 prints from new:

110 prints made from new.

Each ink bottle is 70ml in size, meaning we have to add back 25% of that amount, or 17.5ml, to take out the effect of the ink stored in the lines and heads. Obviously these do not need refilling – it’s a one-off permanent ‘ink sink’ for a new printer.

This computes to use in mL and % of full as follows after adjusting for the ink sink:

BK – pigment black – 0ml, 0%
PB – dye Photo Black – 17ml, 25% – this confirms that the 8550 is only using dye black ink for prints, not pigment black ink. In fact, the 0% use of the pigment black ink suggests that pigment black ink is being reserved solely for printing office documents and dye black is used, by default, for making photographic prints.
C – dye cyan – 25ml, 35%
Y – dye yellow – 17ml, 25%
M – dye magenta – 26ml, 38%
GY – dye grey – 81mL, 116% – I have refilled the GY tank once with 70mL of ink added

The high GY use reflects the many B&W prints made, but averaging the five dye tanks out use (pigment black is not used for prints so that sixth color is disregarded in the calculations that follow) is 166mL or 2.4 tanks for 110 13″x19″ prints. Stated differently, five dye tanks will allow printing of 230 13″ x 19″ prints or, if you prefer 608 (!) 8.5″ x 11″ prints. The cost of five 70mL dye ink bottles of genuine Epson ink (only a fool would use aftermarket substitutes at this price) is around $85 or 48 cents a 13″x19″ print.

That agrees with my definition of frugal, and while you can print office documents using that pigment black ink, I do not recommend that for two reasons: first, it’s bog slow. Second, a cheap desktop laser printer is faster and cheaper.

One note. Dye ink is absorbed by the swellable HP printing paper I am using and probably handled in much the same way by Epson papers and those from other makers. The dyes soak into the emulsion of the paper and need time to dry. In fact, you can feel the tackiness of the surface of a fresh print. So leave new prints out in the air for 24 hours before putting them in sleeves or heating them for mounting, etc.

My high end print drying area.

Not at all bad.

Keith Cooper of Northlight Images has an excellent video about monochrome print making on the Epson ET-8550 here. He knows better than to obfuscate with fancy words but his opening dissertation on the issue with many dye ink jet printers reflecting color casts under artificial lighting is important. That behavior is known as ‘metamerism’, and you really do not want it. Suffice it to say that using HP Premium Gloss paper there is no evidence of metamerism and Cooper reports that all is also well with Epson Premium Luster paper.

What is intriguing about the design of the Epson ET-8550 is that it uses no fewer than three monochrome inks:

Pigment Black, Photo Black Dye and Photo Grey Dye Epson ET-8550 inks

Because the ET-8550 doubles as an office printer, printing on regular paper, it includes pigment ink for that purpose. Pigment ink, like wall paint, dries on the surface and is not absorbed into the substrate, whereas dye ink must be absorbed and the paper chosen in photographic applications must be capable of absorbing ink. Not all photo papers will do that.

Whereas you might think that that no pigment ink would be used in making monochrome photo prints in the ET-8550 Cooper avers this is not the case and it appears that Epson is using some clever combination of the PB Photo Black Dye ink and the BK black pigment ink in printing monochrome images. Do we care? Well, the only thing that matters is the result, so to test things I made two 13″ x 19″ monochrome prints:

Nikon D3x, 35mm f/1.4 Sigma, color original converted to B&W in Lightroom

Leica M3, 50mm Summicron, TriX, scanned in a Canon 4000 film scanner, monochrome original.

In both cases I used the Freestyle custom profile described here. Both prints are drop dead gorgeous – no color cast, no metamerism, just pure monochrome tones.

So it appears that the ET-8550 does a fine job of monochrome printing, but take heed of Cooper’s warning that papers differ, so experiment, and use the right color profile. Epson Premium Luster appears to be a safe bet, based on his experiments, or HP Premium Gloss, based on mine. The Epson printing utility Cooper refers to in the video linked above is not to be found in the US and I much prefer using Lightroom as it simplifies work flow – one tool for all prints. I suggest you adopt a similar philosophy.

Paper jams:

Confirming that with photo printers “It’s always something”, I find that if more than 5 sheets of paper are loaded into the rear paper feeder, the printer will jam. This is for relatively thick paper. The HP Premium Gloss I use weighs in at 280 g/sq. m. So keep it to 5 sheets or less, or be prepared to try and decipher Epson’s arcane un-jamming instructions, invoking garage language and generally wasting time in the process.

Nailing down the variables.

When it comes to getting good color matching out of your printer the exercise has much in common with rocketry. It’s always something. There is a host of variables and just when you think you are prepared for take-off some new gremlin comes along and your rocket or print leaves a useless mess on the launch pad or paper, as the case may be.

What follows reflects my experience with a 2010 Mac Pro running OS 10.13.6 High Sierra with an Epson ET-8550 ink jet printer. An old Mac Pro because “it just works” (remember those days?) and an old version 6.4 of stand-alone Lightroom because it will be a cold day in hell before greedy Adobe extracts a license fee annuity out of me, with the near impossibility of ceasing monthly payments, short of death by the payor.

See what I mean?

Most of this piece is likely of generic applicability to Mac users with this Epson printer who opt to use the Epson non-AirPrint driver, the only driver which will properly allow the user to invoke custom ICC paper profiles in Lightroom. If you have a supply of paper where an ICC profile is not available from the manufacturer, having a tailored profile made is the way to go.

In this earlier piece I explained how my large stock of obsolete HP Premium Gloss photo paper required procurement of a tailored ICC paper profile to optimize screen-print color matching. The HP paper is no longer made and the standard HP profile for that paper, while close, rendered Caucasian skin tones slightly too pink to be acceptable.

The Hollywood place I used (Freestyle) was happy with my second set of color patch prints (I messed up on the first pair and they did a bit of hand holding – thank you, Eric! – to help me get it right) and emailed the new profile to me last night. $99 well spent. To complicate matters Apple Mail kept erasing their emails and I had to resort to an old Gmail address which, of course would only work with iOS as my Mac Pro is too old to allow the use of Gmail, if you can believe that. More planned obsolescence.

So having installed the non-AirPrint Epson printer profile, and deleted the default AirPrint version, as explained here, I found that I could not print on 13”x19” paper. After some whirring nothing happened. I am limited to 8”x10” with the Epson non-AirPrint driver. It’s best pointing out that exactly the same thing happened trying to print using Apple’s Preview application, suggesting the fault lies with Epson not with Adobe or Apple. As with Lightroom, the printer would happily make 13″ x 19″ prints using the AirPrint driver but resolutely refused to print anything with the non-AirPrint driver.

This is why it makes sense to beat this to death before moving on. You really do not want to revisit the large number of variables when it comes to making prints – paper size, margins, paper quality, print quality, ICC profile, printer driver and on and on. Once it’s right, save everything in LR presets – see below – and printing becomes a one-click affair, as it should be.

Having determined that the Epson absolutely refuses to print on 13” x 19” paper if that’s what you dial in in LR when the non-AirPrint Epson printer driver is used, some experimentation was in order. LR works fine with the AirPrint driver at that size but that driver does not invoke custom ICC paper profiles correctly, if at all, and the colors are unacceptable. So the AirPrint default driver that Epson forces you to use unless you know better is useless, in practical terms.

However, the Epson prints 8” x 10” prints just fine on either 8.5” x 11” or 13” x 19” paper. Thus I had to try some sleight of hand and discovered that if you tell the printer the paper is a tad under 13” x 19” it will print, if not borderless, using the Epson non-AirPrint printer driver. The mats I use have an opening of 12.75” x 18.75”, so borderless makes little sense. You simply lose some printed image with borderless prints once matted. And if there is a benefit to using borders then it’s that here is no overspray from the ink jet nozzles messing up the innards of the printer.

In the LR Print module go into Page Setup and you will see:

Click the Paper Size drop down and click on Manage Custom Sizes, and input the variables shown:

This enables you to tell the Epson that your paper is 12.75″ x 18.75″ in size.

Now click on Printer in the LR Print module, clicking Color Matching in the third drop down box. This is an important check. You must see the radio button against Colorsync checked and both buttons greyed out. This confirms that the ICC color profile will be used by LR when printing, not Epson’s stock profiles:

Cancel out of that screen and now click on Print Settings in that same third drop down box:

Conform your setting as with the above. I have chosen Ultra Premium Photo Paper Glossy, which is consonant with my HP paper.

Next, in the Print module of LR scroll the right hand panel (hit F8 to toggle it on or off) and look at the Margins section at the top. Set your Margins and Cell Size as shown:

Then scroll down to the Color Management section:

Click the Profile drop down and choose the ICC paper profile you previously placed in Finder->Your username->Library->ColorSync. You do not want ‘Managed by Printer’ in this box. That setting passes control to Epson’s printer profiles. Select your profile and that’s what the printer will use.

You are ready to print and the Epson ET-8550 will print on 13″ x 19″ paper as long as you tell it that the paper is 12.75″ x 18.75″. The result fits the cut out in my mats perfectly with no white border showing.

Using the new profile from Freestyle the results are excellent. The slight pinkish tinge in Caucasian skin tones (using either Epson Glossy or HP Glossy ICC paper profiles) is gone and the print is a close match to the profiled Benq display used, in as much as that is ever possible. After all, we are comparing a device with a large dynamic range with its own controlled trans-illumination light source – the display – with one with a very poor dynamic range – the print, judged by reflected midday daylight of uncertain color temperature.

Ink use? I must have made some 20 13” x 19” prints – you need to judge at full size, IMO – and can confirm that the ink use from those generous capacity 70ml ‘tanks’ the EPSON uses is very frugal. Here are the levels now. Bear in mind that a good part of the drop from full results from the fact that the printer was new when first filled and the first fill uses maybe 1/8 of each tank to prime the heads and feed tubes – that’s equal to one half the distance between the quarter marks in the image. Paper use? What do I care? I have hundreds and hundreds of sheets in my inventory.

Ink levels after the first fill up and some 20 13″ x 19″ prints.

Like I said at the start of this entry, with printers it’s always something. Here’s to the next problem …. and no thanks to Epson for their poor printer driver designs and installations.

Using Apple Preview.

I elected to use Freestyle Photo to generate the ICC profile for my Epson printer + HP Glossy paper combination. One reason is that their instructions are clear with no broken links. The other is that they include instructions for printing their test targets with Apple applications. Many of the other profiling sites use an Adobe utility and – surprise, surprise – it’s no longer available in an Apple version.

I was fortunate to deal with Eric Joseph at Freestyle and it’s clear he has forgotten more about color profiling than most of us will ever know. An articulate professional with excellent analytical and teaching skills, he guided me through what follows. I’m repeating the instructions here as the value of what is out there on the web approximates that of a used toilet paper roll.

What appears below applies to any paper used with the Epson.

Click the image.

Freestyle Photo have you use Apple Preview with OS X Ventura for printing. Their instructions are here.

What follows are instructions on how to create a print of the Freestyle targets with no color management, which allows them to craft a proper ICC profile for your printer.

I am on the older Mac OS High Sierra (10.13.6) and Preview did not show me all those printing options which appear in the Freestyle/Ventura instructions. Eric advised that the default installation with the ET-8550 is of the Air Print driver. Indeed, go to System Preferences->Printers & Scanner and choose the E-8550 and you will see the word ‘AirPrint’ where the red arrow appear in the following image:

You do NOT want to see ‘AirPrint’ at the arrowed location.

‘Airprint’ is NOT the printer driver you want. AirPrint drivers are significantly ‘crippled’ and do not provide the full functionality needed for this exercise. We must de-install the AirPrint driver by hitting the ‘-‘ symbol. See the bulleted steps below.

The goal, when printing Freestyle’s two test targets, is to avoid any color management at the printing stage, so that the un-managed image is what appears on the test print. You need to activate the stock non-AirPrint driver to be able to accomplishing this in Preview. Both the AirPrint driver (default) and the non-AirPrint driver are installed as part of the normal installation process, but it is the AirPrint version which is activated by default. And that is not the one we want.

Do not try doing this in Photoshop or Lightroom. Those complex applications make it impossible to turn off all software color management.

In System Preferences->Printers & Scanners:

• De-activate the default AirPrint driver by hitting the ‘-‘ sign
• Hit the ‘+’ symbol
• Hit ‘Add Printer or Scanner’. Do NOT hit ‘EPSON ET-8550 Series’ – that’s the AirPrint default installation
• In the screen which opens click on ‘EPSON ET-8550 Series Bonjour Multifunction’
• The ‘Use’ box will appear, filled with ‘Secure AirPrint’. WRONG. Drop down that box and select ‘EPSON ET-8550 Series’. You will get the message ‘Setting up EPSON ET-8550 Series’. That’s it – the full printer driver is now installed and you will have retained wireless printing capability if that was your original choice. You can also use an Ethernet or USB cable.
• The full range of Print options will now appear in Apple Preview.

Fire up Preview and load the first of the two targets downloaded from Freestyle. Set the drop downs in the red rectangle-outlined boxes in Preview->Print as shown:

Follow these exactly. This is for HP Gloss paper.

You want ‘EPSON Color Controls’, not ‘Colorsync’.

Now that you have Epson Color Controls, check you have turned them off thus:

Check that there is no printer driver color management.

In my case a Scale setting of 101% delivers the required
8 5/16″ target height called for by Freestyle.

The 101% size setting is required to exactly comply with Freestyle’s sizing requirements stated on their site. Adjust the ‘Scale’ setting until you comply with their required printed target height of 8 5/16″.

Print the first, then the second target, being careful to replicate the above settings for the second (they will change to defaults), pay $99, add your name and details to the printed targets and mail your targets in a stout cardboard envelope to Freestyle. And never handle paper without cotton gloves – the grease from your fingers will not help with the profiling process, nor with print longevity.

Doing it right with cotton gloves.