EPSON Stylus Pro 5500 looked good but suffered poor color

Since thousands of Epson Stylus Pro 5500 printers are available used and on eBay it is necessary to maintain up to date. In order to evaluate what end-users would actually experience we hired Lisa Perone, a graduate student in the College of Technology, Bowling Green State University. Her assignment was to find out how easy or difficult it was to achieve your first print with the Epson 5500.

She achieved a pretty print and liked the printer. We at FLAAR therefore felt it was a great printer and said so. We include Perone’s comments in the appendix to our FLAAR Report on desktop sized printers in our Photo Series.

Regrettably at the Seybold San Francisco '02 trade show we received a rather succinct report by experts in color management about problems with the Epson 5500 color gamut. We also got a rather bluntly honest assessment of the pros and cons of the Epson 5500 while in Belgium. A professional photographer in Switzerland even sent us all of his comments from the day he happily bought the printer and to the day he furiously junked the printer due to his disillusionment. If you are about to purchase an Epson 5500 take heed and be sure to obtain the FLAAR Report-Series which cover s the whole spectrum of fine art giclée printers.

FLAAR has a network of correspondents around the world so we can provide an international perspective. We learned that allegedly Epson dealers themselves refused to sell this printer in Europe because so many astute photographers returned them and demanded their money back. In addition we learned off the record that Epson dealers in the United States were also leery of selling the Epson 5500.

What we learned from our experiences with the Epson 5500 was that a superficial usage was an inadequate test. To really uncover the truth about a printer you have to acquire end-users actual-factual experiences.

The Epson 2200 is an attempt to offer a desktop printer with a wider color gamut, but end-users wrote us to say it has a few issues of its own. So now Epson is trying to replace both printers with their Epson 4000. I fail to understand why they mention the Epson 3000 in their ads for the Epson 4000, since the 3000 was the most glitch-prone printer they made besides the infamous Epson 1520. But at least each generation of Epson printer does have fewer problems than the one before. It is unfortunate that end users were beta testers so many years.

As soon as the Epson 4000 is available to test we can judge whether or not it falls victim to the accumulated problems of earlier models. Epson managers have done an excellent job of listening to what end-users want in a printer. We look forward to a new and improved Epson that can content customers.

Now you see why we constantly update the FLAAR Reports. The FLAAR Reports contain pithy evaluations in more detail than is possible on a web page. The FLAAR Reports are in full-color, in Adobe Acrobat PDF format.

Nicholas Hellmuth (at left) with the Epson Stylus Pro 5500.