Has anyone the new HP B9180

Has anyone bought the new HP B9180? It has excellent reviews but I haven't seen any user comments yet.

Some user reports here:http://forums.dpreview​.com/forums/forum.asp?​forum=1003

I'm looking very seriously at the B9180. At the moment, it's my preferred printer of the machines currently available or soon to be available, but I'm intending to wait another 3-4 weeks before buying.

Availability of supplies in the UK is extremely poor. Nobody seems to have the full range of eight cartridges available, and finding any Advanced Photo Paper is a case of scrabbling around - I want decent availability and an idea of how pricing is going to stabilise once supplies are generally available. I also have a slight concern that HP only seem to have announced A3 Matte media, and not smaller sizes (I'd rather not have to put larger sheets through my rotary trimmer).

Availability of B9180 printers in the UK is not great either.


There seem to be a few 'early adopter' nits with the B9180, judging by the Photo-i B9180 forum. Some of these seem possibly to be firmware and driver related. I expect they will get solved over time. Nevertheless, I'd rather let someone else debug the printer than do it myself, especially if there's any hardware changes.

I bought an HP Color LaserJet 3800dtn rather early in the product cycle. Around the beginning of the year, my old Color LaserJet 2500n broke and wasn't worth fixing - the known fault was likely to be fairly expensive, and there were signs it needed an exchange formatter which was completely uneconomic to sort. I really wanted the advantages of the 3800 series over the older 3700 series which were being discontinued, so I went for the 3800dtn.

It has subsequently gone through three versions of formatter firmware, two versions of DC controller firmware, three versions of JetDirect firmware and two versions of the printer drivers to get to the excellent, stable machine that sits behind me today. Fortunately HP have made it relatively straightforward to upgrade both formatter and DC controller firmware - up until very recently, DC controller firmware wasn't upgradeable on many machines.

It wasn't bad "out of the box", and most of the issues were very minor, though I did wait until there was enough real world user experience on the Internet to be reasonably secure that I wasn't buying a lemon. I intend to hang on a little while longer before jumping on the B9180 bandwagon.


My need for a new printer

I was musing here about my options, though that post was written before I realised that HP were going to release the long overdue B9180, and that respected reviewers were going to regard it as worthy of comparison to Epson and Canon.


Since I wrote that last post, looking at the Epson R2400 (which has been the de facto leader in the A3+ pigment photo printer market) against the forthcoming Canon offerings, things have got more serious.

My old DeskJet 1220C has died; it may just be a defective colour cartridge, but I'm not paying £40 for a new cartridge for 7 year old technology. It's not borderless, the gamut is terrible, it's not colour managed, it's an expensive machine to use (as it uses a tri-colour cartridge) - simply put, it's obsolete. There is now a demonstrated need for an A3 colour printer in the next two months; the family member who is a consultant and trainer is needing me to produce some A3 material for a new series of courses starting in January. It was whilst trying to print the first A3 sheet on the 1220C that it died.


What about the Epson Stylus Pro 3800?

The new Epson Stylus Pro 3800 is pretty much my dream printer - but is just too expensive. It solves the drawbacks of the R2400 with regard to not having Matte Black permanently fitted and it has a built in print server.

Part of the extra price is offset by the extra ink included compared to the R2400 anyway - but the UK pricing just doesn't stack up - the 3800 RRP is £1170 including VAT (just a few pounds cheaper than an EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS). There's a good thread talking about the 3800 versus the HP B9180 on the photo-i forums. In the US, if you're going to use the ink anyway, it works out no more expensive than an R2400, but in the UK it's significantly more expensive (see, in particular, JSR's post in the thread here). In any case, I'm not sure that my usage is going to be high enough to use up 80ml cartridges before the ink is life-expired.

Finally, the 3800 is also a large beast, being A2 capable - and, in truth, I don't need A2 capabilities. A3 is as big as I'm wanting to print.


Disregarding the 3800 leaves me with the B9180, the R2400 and the still-vapourware Canon Pixma Pro 9500. Whatever I buy this time has to be pigment - I'm not buying another dye based printer, so the Pixma Pro 9000 is out.


Canon Pixma Pro 9500

The Pixma Pro 9500 is going to be a 12 ink printer, whereas the B9180 and R2400 are both 8 ink printers. I expect the 9500 to have a gamut advantage over the B9180 and R2400 (not least based on reviews of the Canon iPF5000, which uses what I think will turn out to be the same ink set), but it's not huge.

The 9500 won't network easily (if at all), and is likely to be significantly more expensive than the B9180 and R2400 (which are in the £450-500 bracket including VAT). The preliminary information for the 9500 indicates it's going to be around £650, so I'd guess at £600 street price.

The only features the 9500 has that I'd like and that the other printers lack is a CD-R tray. It may be possible to make a tray for the B9180 (one person who had a pre-release machine reckoned he'd done just that), but my i865 works, I've got a complete spare set of ink tanks for it on the shelf, so I could keep the i865 and dedicate that to CD-Rs when I've used up the supply of photo paper on less critical jobs. I've got enough ink on the shelf to print something like 300 full face colour CD-Rs.

Further, I think the 9500 just isn't going to be available in time for my requirements - I need the printer by mid January.


The comparison to my mind

Epson R2400

Pros

• Proven technology
  
• Machine and supplies readily available
  
• Roll paper support
  
• Wide third party paper support, with many companies having profiles available

• Not really networkable (may be possible with a USB print server, but likely to lose ink monitoring etc.)
  
• No CD-R tray
  
• Impossible to install Photo Black and Matte Black at once (unless you go for a solution such as PhatteBlack where you sacrifice Light Light Black and use modified drivers)

• Networkable, with print server built in
  
• Machine and supplies likely to be readily available within weeks
  
• Can change individual printheads if there's any problems (each printhead covers two of the eight inks)
  
• Closed-loop density calibration system (whilst it's not a built in spectrophotometer, this should hold things much more stable over time, and reviewers seem very glad to find this technology in this price bracket at last - it may prove sufficient for generic B9180 ICC profiles to be significantly more accurate than generic profiles on the competing Canon and Epson models and eliminate the need for custom profiles in many cases)
  
• Intelligent cleaning and standby system which, if it works as HP intends, should waste very little ink on cleaning and should avoid print flaws due to clogged jets
  
• Judging by the Wilheim Research report, looks as if print longevity may be even better than the Epson R2400
  
• Black and White seems as if it may be even more neutral than Epson R2400, despite the lack of Light Light Black ink - the Epson does use some light colours in the prints
  
• Bundle available with a rebranded Gretag Macbeth screen calibration system if you don't already have a screen calibration system (no use to me, as I already have a Monaco OPTIX XR Pro, which is of very similar performance to the Eye One Display 2 that I believe HP are rebranding, but it may be worth it for some - though this shows that HP are taking colour management seriously)

• No CD-R tray (unless you're prepared to cobble)
  
• Seemingly some teething troubles - but I'm hopeful they'll be sorted soon
  
• No roll paper support - though there's some mention online of people jury-rigging a roll paper feeder as has been done with some HP DesignJets (in truth, I'm not that likely to use roll paper, and supposedly the drivers can cope with prints up to 44 inches long, which means some panoramic capability, maybe using cut sections from roll media that you can flatten before printing)

• 12 ink system - likely to be wider gamut
  
• CD-R tray

• Unknown networkability - the best that's likely to be possible is a USB print server, probably with the loss of ink monitoring
  
• Vapourware for the moment
  
• Looks as if the machine may be significantly more expensive than the Epson and the HP
  
• No roll paper support, unclear if the drivers will support long print jobs at all

I eventually bought the B9180, and was fortunate to get one with the October firmware that has a couple of annoying bugs (particularly the printer crashing when it's in standby and you open the specialist media tray - which means power cycling the printer and the consequential use of some ink). I'm very pleased with it this far.


I went right off the Epson 3800 when I realised that although it has all 9 cartridges installed, it switches between Photo Black and Matte Black, using up quite a bit of ink in the process. It's a 9 cartridge printer with only 8 channels in the head.

David