Product Reviews

Epson has sent regular salvos in the direction of publishing and design professionals over the years with A3 colour inkjets which were inexpensive but best used only for in-house proofing. Now everything has changed with the introduction of the Epson Color Proofer 5000, a machine ready to muscle into the market without preconception or compromise.

The Proofer 5000 is supplied as a one-stop proofing solution, comprising Epson's new flagship super-A3 inkjet printer, the Stylus Pro 5000, plus a Fiery Colour Server hardware RIP from EFI and colour profiling developed with DuPont's CromaNet Color technology. Although the central unit is obviously the Epson printer, the co-development approach between the three companies rather than a more conventional licensing deal is unusual and bears unexpected fruits.

The Stylus Pro 5000 is one of several Epson products now offering the MicroPiezo printhead system for 'photo-quality' inkjet printing. Rarely has an A3 inkjet actually fulfilled this claim, however, so the 1440dpi output of this Epson printer comes as something of a surprise.

Epson quotes figures for MicroPiezo, a non-thermal technology, including a 20% reduction in dot size on the paper, given the right quality of stock. Figures aside, the quality of the Stylus Pro 5000's output is quite outstanding, and quite unlike any other A3 inkjet we have seen.

Building on the success of Epson's low-cost Stylus Photo, an A4 device which employs a six-colour inking system (CMYK plus light cyan and light magenta), the same technology is built into the Stylus Pro 5000. Rather than widening the colour gamut beyond process inks, as Hexachrome does, Epson's six-ink system effectively spreads the density of the dots so that the eye perceives continuous tone, not unlike the kind of results achieved with dye-sublimation proofers. The main difference, when compared with dye-sublimation, is that inkjets don't suffer from fuzziness at what ought to be crisp edges. The clarity of text and line art produced by the Stylus Pro 5000, even at 720dpi, is easily a match for that achieved with the prepress Iris inkjet proofers from Scitex, and arguably superior.

Alone, it's an astonishingly good printer. With the Fiery RIP, it's a genuine contender for mainstream

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digital proofing. Based on a 133MHz MIPS R4700 processor with 32Mb RAM and a 2.1Gb internal hard disk, the device sucks up print jobs at a generally good rate and lets you manage the queue of waiting jobs with the Fiery spooler provided. You can equally use Fiery WebTools with a Web browser from anywhere on the network to download printer files locally, obtain print status information, and change job parameters. 100/10Base-T and 10Base-5 AUI Ethernet, EtherTalk TCP/IP and NetWare are supported as standard, and no per-head licensing restrictions have been attached to the tools and print drivers.

With this set-up, everyone on the network prints to the RIP, but the driver offers specific support for the Epson device it's feeding. It's hardly a new idea, but selling the package as a ready-made proofing solution at this kind of price deserves attention from the kind of buyer who could not normally stretch to a mainstream proofer, which cost in the region of £10,000 to £20,000.

It comes across as more convenient than proofers which require a near-dedicated Mac print server to run a software RIP, and more flexible than single-box devices which make up for average RIPing speed with huge quantities of expensive memory.

On the topic of flexibility, the factthat the Proofer 5000 is a multi-functional inkjet makes it one of the more unusual products in its market. There are not many professional digital proofers which can print on anything from A3 glossy film to A6 index cards and DL envelopes without requiring a change of toner or ribbon. The machine is fed by four ink cartridges inserted at the front on either side of the 250-sheet autoloader (an extra 250-sheet autoloader can be added underneath). Each cartridge is rated with a print life of roughly 3000 A4 sheets, which certainly beats dye-sublimation printers in terms of convenience and cost. Cost of consumables per A3 proof is reckoned to be around £5 to £7 which, although high, is competitive.

There are limitations which affect inkjets too, most notably in this case being speed. The way in which jobs are fed by the RIP to the printer in strip sections rather than whole pages is inevitable rather than efficient, and some high-resolution A3 jobs at 1440dpi can take a good half-hour to complete. It's also worth bearing in mind that the machine makes the familiar whizz-whizz noise you would expect from an inkjet, and you might not want to have one located in the office right next to you.

Otherwise, it's difficult to find fault in the Proofer 5000. Output quality is among the best in the digital proofing industry, and colour fidelity is very good thanks to sound colour profiling and the effective application of the EFI Color Wise system. It's a full PostScript 3 device, and ColorSync use always remains an option. At this price, every publishing house should buy one.