The Pro line starts at 17" maximum width, has higher build quality (and much larger ink cartridges, and therefore cheaper-per-milliliter ink), and you get access to Epson's professional support services. With the Stylus Pro line, you get a dedicated 800 number for specialist tech support and their goal is next-business-day replacement of your printer if it breaks. With the Stylus Photo line, tech support is long distance or e-mail, the techs support the entire Epson product line, and repair/replacement is the usual "ship it in and you'll get a new one in a week or so" approach.
The Stylus Pro printers with roll feeders also offer built-in automatic paper cutting, which Epson hasn't offered on the consumer printers for a couple years.
If you want to make prints bigger than 13" wide, you have to step up to the Stylus Pro line. Beyond that (and the repair service), you could really go either way depending on your budget and needs.
Thanks for the info. I take it they are all RGB machines? Any noticeable difference in print quality? Seems the photo line uses smaller droplet sizes than the Pro line but I could be wrong about that.
Is there a best place to buy the pro line? The photo line should be available just about anywhere I guess. I'll stop with the dumb questions.
There are no dumb questions. Better to ask now than be one of the sad sacks who goes into it blind and hates printing forever.
Yep, they all speak RGB despite the physical color of the inks.
Pretty much all the printers have 3.5 picoliters as their smallest droplet size. The Pro line uses three droplet sizes whereas I believe the R2400 has two. The Pro printers also have newer screening algorithms than the Photo printers (with the exception of maybe the R1900)... It gets them closer to continuous tone under magnification, but at normal viewing distances it's nothing to get too frothy about in most cases. Subtly better, and subtly more sharp-looking, but nothing completely Earth-shattering.
The only other real tangible difference is that the current 4000, 7000, and 9000 series Stylus Pros have the newer K3 with Vivid Magenta inkset. It improves the gamut in the blues and purples a reasonable amount, but the original K3 (which the Pro 3800 and Photo R2400 are using) wasn't particularly deficient.
Photo line's available just about anywhere, and the Stylus Pro 3800 is available pretty widely. The 4880 on up are only available from Epson Pro Graphics dealers, which you can locate through Epson's site. Unless one vendor's running an amazing promo, they're all about the same, since they're almost all going to end up drop-shipping the big heavy beasts to you anyway. Off the top of my head, Shades of Paper and InkJetArt sell the full Pro line for decent prices.
Thanks again for the info. Good stuff. I saw a friend's 20x30 taken with a Rebel XT shot at a lower setting than the jpg L and it looked pretty good. Don't know how they did that but that's what made me want to get into this.
