Printer Drivers and MyEpson.com
The Drivers found on the x900 are very similar to those for the x880 printers. One nice change is that the driver will now intelligently sync with Photoshop CS3/CS4. If color management is set to “Photoshop Manages Colors” in Photoshop the driver will automatically disable printer color management, avoiding color manage-
ment conflicts. The Mac driver now also supports 16 bit input when printing from OS X 10.5. This option does give the driver more data from which to create the screening; however, any real world advantage is likely to be quite minimal.
From the printer utility you can also manually initiate nozzle checks, head cleaning and alignment. A new option now also allows users to create, manage, and sync custom paper types with the printer.
The Epson driver is also where the Advance Black and White mode is controlled. Because the Epson black is not perceptually neutral it must be combined with other inks to produce a neutral tone black and white. The advance Black and White mode com- bines special screening and a carefully controlled mix of color inks to produce very good looking black and white prints. There is also the option of custom toning the prints to give them a warm or cool tone.
My EpsonPrinter.com (coming soon)
MyEpsonPrinter.com is a
lot of promise. The service allows for basic tasks such as checking the ink levels of a remote printer as well as tracking jobs and print costs.
While some of the functionality may be overkill for small businesses with a single printer, it provides administrators a number of tools to track and manage a fleet of widely distributed printers across an entire organization. Since the service is hosted web based, there is some question about how it will work with cor- porate intranets with tight security policies. MyEpson- printer.com is under free public beta until March 2009. It supports both the x880 and x900 series.
