As I reported earlier, I had decided to wait on upgrading my 3880 to a 4900, but someone wanted to buy the 3880, and that was enough to push me over the edge. The 4900 arrived on a pallet, with the box standing about two feet high above the top of the base. UPS said the whole thing weighed 175 pounds. The printer itself hits the scales at 115 pounds with no ink, no paper, and no roller. It’s definitely a two- or three-person job to move it into position.
Once in place, set up is pretty easy. Remove lots of blue tape (there’s no print head lockdown screw), plug it in, load the 11 (!) ink cartridges, let the printer charge the lines, turn it off again, plug in the Ethernet cable, power it on, print out the network status sheet, note the IP address, install the software, configure the printer port, and print a test page.
Like the 3880, there are three ways to load paper. Thin sheets go in a stack in a tray located under the output tray, which means there’s a tighter bending radius than in the 3880 with its top-loading stack feeder. Most fine-art paper gets fed one sheet at a time through a slot on the top of the printer. I did not turn off the paper check feature, and I have not yet encountered the dreaded “paper skew” error that has bedeviled 3800 and 3880 users for years.
For really thick paper, there’s a one-sheet-at-a-time absolutely flat paper path fed from the front of the printer. Since it’s flat, you need a lot of space behind the printer if you’re going to use it. I don’t plan to.
So far, I’ve just used the color profiles that came with the printer, but I will make some myself when I get the time. The increased gamut that comes from having the orange and the green inks is evident.
This is the first large-format Epson printer that I’ve set up with no swear words.
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