I’ve just finished getting my new wide-format printer (an Epson Stylus Pro 7880) up and running. This is my second wide-format printer – I got my Epson Stylus Pro 7600 in November of 2003 – and it’s always a slightly traumatic process, purchasing a beast that usually lives in somewhat commercial locations, and setting it up in a very much residential situation. I’m happy to say though that it was somewhat smoother the second time around.
I basically bought the same printer, two new models down the line. Since I was always very happy with my 7600, it seemed a reasonable choice. I eliminated getting a larger printer – after all a 44” printer now costs less than a 24” printer did in ’03 – because of its huge size; no need for that headache, considering that the options for printing the occasional large format outside of my studio are mushrooming. My collective studio, the Atelier Circulaire, acquired a 44” wide HP printer last summer; moreover, I just learned of the existence of Daïmõn, a non-profit research/creation/production center for photography, multimedia, new technologies etc. They have an Epson 9600, and the wonderful bit is that they are, oh, three miles away, unlike the Atelier Circulaire, which is now nearly three hours away from me. A third option is the fine art printing (also Epson-based) webcommerce www.imagekind.com – not sure about their delivery costs yet, but their printing costs are very reasonable. The 7600 and the 7880 both weigh about 110 pounds, and that’s plenty already, for two smallish people to move around; I was happy to have no reason to go any bigger. As for other 24” printers, I did take a look at the competition, but in the end didn’t find their advantages enough to tempt me to switch.
So, Monday Jan 26 I got my order in, after getting my CDW.ca representative to assure me that I would get delivery before the end of the month (for the 780 C$ rebate expiring Jan 31). I asked him to get back to me on shipping options and pricing – I was possibly interested, depending on pricing, on a more expensive service that would actually deliver the printer upstairs. The quote was showing 20$ shipping. That seemed very unlikely, but my representative thought maybe later once the order was ‘really in’ he’d be able to get back to me with more accurate information. At any rate, he put into the system a comment for the shipping people to contact me for delivery details.
Tuesday around lunch time, having had no word from either CDW or the shipping company, I had the door buzzer go off. A slightly worried truck driver had my printer in his truck outside, and was shaking his head over my residential address. You buy a commercial printer, apparently you’re supposed to have a shipping/receiving department to receive it, not one skinny little artist. The shipping fee really was only 20$ — and the driver was supposed to be able to drive up to a loading dock and trolley the package out.
Well he was a nice fellow, he was willing to bend the rules and lend a hand; but he was alone; I was alone; how were we going to get the 210 lb package in? (The printer is 110 lbs, but with stand, ink and packing material, somehow weighs in at 210 lbs). I suggested he should bring the truck around back, there would be less stairs to contend with (just to get to the ground floor; we clearly were abandoning any idea of upstairs delivery). He was skeptical, said his truck was rather large. I stepped forward to look at his truck – we were standing in my apartment block’s tiny foyer, or rather he was standing in it, and I was standing in the doorway of the inner door, holding the door open – and the inner door closed automatically behind me, locking me in the foyer with no keys, no cell phone, and, apparently, no-one home in the other apartments who could buzz me in. In slippers, for that matter (and we have a couple of feet of snow outside).
The question was now moot — of whether it would be better to have the truck in front or behind, and whether we could move the printer with only two people. So I got a phone number to call him to arrange delivery when my husband would be there, and spent a couple hours waiting for someone to come home, trapped in the little entranceway, pacing, ringing the doorbells of my neighbours every few minutes, doing squats, yoga, arm stretches, ski side-to-side jumps, singing (about being an unhappy cat locked up in a cube), thinking about ideas for drawings, thinking about ideas for computer programming abstract art …
The delivery was arranged for the next morning, I got a rolling cart from upstairs, and shovelled the back walkway in case we could convince the truck driver to come in that way. He had his own ideas, which were to dismantle the box in the street; inside of some fifteen minutes, we dismantled and brought everything in, and were done. I didn’t owe anything extra for 2nd trip or household delivery (although the shipping form had boxes to check for additional charges for these things) and the driver refused (very nicely) my offered tip for his troubles beyond the calls of duty.
Assembled the stand – this went smoothly with the Epson instructions. Although I am perturbed by one thing: I don’t know what to do with my “K: Collars (2)”. These mysterious C shaped pieces are listed on the stand hardware list – stand-alone sheet version – but are not mentioned on the stand hardware list in the manual, nor in the instructions there. Nonetheless a lot easier than last time, when I made my own stand, because Epson hadn’t yet started selling the stand included in the printer price.
The next part was putting the printer on its stand. This involved a few false starts of the two of us lifting up the 110 pound mini-monster, hovering over the stand, and not quite figuring out the alignment. And having to put it back down on the table next to the stand, before our arms give out. Not only you can’t see the stand you are aiming for, the manual is singularly mute about exactly how things should line up (and they do have to line up exactly). The diagram is also singularly badly drawn – in fact, I’d say the stand has undergone a slight remodeling and acquired an extra piece since they did the drawing, among other things. Hint: the rear round rubbery feet go in those rear round holes.
I haven’t put up the nice cloth paper catcher because I don’t want to leave it out in the cats’ reach, have it get covered with fur, if nothing else. This is new, having the wide-format printer in a room the cats can get at, nay, the cats live in. I’m definitely going to need to improvise a cover out of some old sheets, perhaps wheel it into a closed room if we go away.
I meditated for a day or so on how to rearrange the living room/office to incorporate the printer, so that we wouldn’t have to carry it upstairs. I ended up with a working plan, but it required changing my L-shaped desk to a straight-through desk; moreover, I had to change its “handedness” (getting the short section to be to the right of the long one instead of to the left). Luckily it all worked out, by dint of taking the tops off and putting them back on back to front, adding a brace here and a connecting segment there… I spent the next day or so moving away all the stuff piled on my desk, taking it apart, prototyping my reassembly ideas, and getting everything back together again.
For comparison, in 2003, I bought my printer off of Ebay (new) from a California dealer; a couple hundred dollars of shipping only got it to Montreal airport. I had to make two separate trips to the airport, in unpleasant weather, first to get the printer through customs, and then to bring it back to my home – by jettisoning all the packing material at the airport (the people there frowned at me but let me do it); the naked printer just barely fit into my Honda Civic hatchback. I now have a Honda Civic sedan, so can’t carry around wide format printers anymore 
.
You see, now, why I dread getting a printer that’s any larger.
Well this is getting far too long; I’ll cover why I got a new printer, how I chose it, and my printing experiences so far with the new printer, in the next entry.
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