I print my photographs using Image Print on my Epson 4800. It’s a great RIP with terrific ICC profiles for tons and tons of papers. And it solves one of the most distressing problems with the 4800. If you want to switch between matte and glossy or luster papers you have to replace the Matte Black ink cartridge with the Photo Black cartridge. When you do this the printer purges the lines for ALL 8 cartridges, wasting about $75 worth of ink.
With Image Print you place the Photo Black cartridge in the black slot and the Matte Black cartridge in the light light black slot. Then, with one targeted purge of just those two lines you’re ready to go. Just use their special ICC profiles.
The trick is that the Matte Black cartridge needs to be altered to make the printer think it’s a Light Light Black cartridge. There’s a little chip on each cartridge that the printer reads to confirm that the correct cartridge has been inserted. So you fool the printer by replacing the Matte Black chip with a Light Light Black chip. Do that and you’re off and running. These cartridges are called Phatte Black. Get it – PHoto mATTE Black? Cute.
But where do you get these specially altered cartridges. This is where DTG comes into the picture. If you Google “Phatte Black”, their name is about the only one that comes up as far as vendors are concerned. So I ordered a cartridge from them, got it a few days later and switched over. Everything’s great.
Several months ago, as the cartridge was starting to get low, I ordered another and set it aside. A few weeks ago the original cartridge finally ran out of ink and I went to replace it. But when I pulled the new cartridge from its box it was obvious that all the ink had leaked. Fortunately these cartridges come sealed in plastic bags which contained the ink. Otherwise, imagine the mess 220 ml of black pigment ink would have caused.
I immediately sent DTG an email, explaning my situation and asking for their help. I was in a really tight situation. I needed to get ready for a large, three-day art festival and had a lot of last minute printing to do, all of which I explained in my email. Sadly, the email went unacknowledged. A couple of days later I pinged them again and once again received no response.
So I want to my local Calumet store in Santa Ana, California. They didn’t have any Phatte Black cartridges in their store but could see that the LA store had one. They ordered it from LA and had it in their store in a couple of days. They even offered to drop ship it directly to me. I got my cartridge and got all of my printing done on time.
So where does this leave DTG? The only things I can think of is they have a customer service department that doesn’t read their emails or they do read them and simply don’t care. I just sent them a third email. We’ll see if they respond to this one. But as far as DTG being there for their customers in a pinch, well, they’re not.
But Calumet is. And Calumet will get my business in the future. Calumet rocks!
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Lexjet Sells Phatte Black cartridges.