Epson SC-P5070

Make quality prints at home with Epson’s new professional-grade printer.

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Last year, I listened as an Auckland Museum collections manager implored photographers to store their work safely. Make three back-ups, he advised, in a variety of future-proofed file formats.

Meanwhile, ‘father of the internet’ Vint Cerf worried out loud that our record of the present day will disappear if it’s kept on a hard drive that becomes corrupted, or in a file format that goes out of date.

One solution—one that’s worked pretty well for the last 178 years—is for photographers to print their work.

The Epson SC-P5070 is a high-end model designed to accurately reproduce colour tones and contrast levels, and to print on top-quality photographic paper. It features an array of improvements to the previous generation of Epson printers, which means that the P5070 is cheaper to run and easier to maintain. It’s more efficient with ink, for instance, and it’s better at keeping dust out of its internal parts.

The P5070 is controlled using a full-colour 2.7-inch LCD panel. It accepts a new range of ink cartridges, which in turn contain newly-developed pigments. These are claimed to be twice as permanent as the previous generation of inks. There is a wider range of colours on offer, and the blacks are one-and-a-half times denser than previous inks, meaning that the contrast of printed photographs can be more intense.

Two ink configurations, Violet or Light Light Black, are designed to suit different applications; Violet matches 99 per cent of Pantone colours, making it an industry-leading choice for proofing, but it doesn’t have the resistance to fading or long-term stability of Light Light Black, which delivers Pantone coverage of 98 per cent.

High-quality printing also requires high-quality paper, and the P5070 allows photographers to print on a variety of media. It has a roll feeder, meaning that it can print on rolls up to 15 metres in length. Its front paper cassette tray can hold up to 100 sheets of premium photo paper, and it can print on sheets up to A2+ size, on poster board up to 1.5 millimetres thick, and right to the edge of some paper formats. Your finest work will be future-proofed at last.

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RRP: $3295

See more at: epson.co.nz