HP B9180 printer

HP B9180 printer

For years now, professional pigment ink printing has been the exclusive domain of Epson it seemed. Canon and HP competed at every other level, its just they seemed to give Epson a free hand when it came to this segment of the market or perhaps the others thought Epson had such a huge head start with their pigment ink technology it was too much investment to catch up.

Whatever the reason, that was then and this is now and good god do Epson have competition finally. I read that HP spent 2 years and hundreds of millions of dollars in research and development in order to bring out a new range of professional printers. Of course they wanted to make as big a splash as possible, so they went above and beyond what others were doing and added unique benefits such as closed loop calibration and even built-in spectrophotometer’s in the Z line to make your own profiles for any paper, not just their own brand.

I was using a combination of Epson R1800 and R2400 printers until about six months ago. I used the R1800 pigment printer because it gave great color glossy & luster photographs. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very good with black and white, no matter what I did so I ended up running a R2400 as well. The R2400 gave great black and white, but just good colour prints plus it had the added annoyance of needing to switch black inks depending on the paper. I had heard of the HP B9180 and saw that people were speaking very highly of it as it did great black and white as well as color prints so decided to give it a try.

I’ll give you the end result first, I sold both the R1800 and R2400 and now use the B9180 for both prints as it was better in each of the two Epson’s strengths. The prints I get out of the HP are fantastic, they are detailed with rich and accurate colours time and time again. Perhaps that is down to the closed loop calibration device built into the printer as I know it compares the colors and makes adjustments if they don’t match what its internal benchmark indicates they should look like - whatever the reason, it simply works.

Almost every good printer will give excellent color prints these days, the resolution they all talk about really means nothing, we’ve got to the point that they are all excellent. Where they don’t fair so well is black and white as its very hard for them to produce neutral prints when using the various colors of your printer to simulate shades of black. The R2400 was very good at this and the B9180 is its equal, I get lovely neutral black and white without distracting and off-putting color casts.

We have some nice extra’s when it comes to the HP B9180 such as its built like a tank, honestly you could use the printer as a table and it wouldn’t faze it. I was shocked when lifting this printer out of its box, it weighs a ton and it’s not what you expect. I love the fact its built so well as it gives me confidence the printer will last and last. It also has built-in network ability out of the box, which I appreciate so I can print to it from any networked printer. The part I really love and qualifies as more than an extra when printing as often as I do, is the fact the cartridges are about double the size of the R1800/2400 which means much less swapping of inks. Its a good thing too, as I haven’t seen any CIS systems for this printer and would guess that they’d be hard to make anyway with the way its designed. Regardless, its of little importance as the HP ink tanks last a lot longer and for a medium format printer the cartridges are the largest currently available. I am a very happy camper with this printer, I really liked having the two Epson’s at the time but I don’t miss them one bit as I’ve got one machine without the wires from a CIS that prints both archival color and black & white exceptionally well, plus its hooked up to my network. A great buy