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At school I've been using an Epson Stylus Pro 3880 and have gotten kind of addicted to printing my photos. The R3000 is half the cost and almost exactly the same except for it's narrower 13" maximum print width (vs the 17" 3880). Both use the "UltraChrome K3 with Vivid Magenta" ink set which is the same one used by almost all of Epson's "Pro" line of printers. Honestly, I don't know why the R3000 isn't in their "Pro" line since it could reasonably be used by a pro who never needed to print anything wider than 13".
I printed some color test charts at the Sam's Club photo lab (which should be reasonable quality since they actually calibrate their printers at least once a day and when they change paper rolls) and on my R3000, then compared them to an actual X-Rite produced ColorChecker chart, and the output from the R3000 significantly beats the output from Sam's Fuji Frontier minilab photo printer. The Fuji Frontier print is noticeably duller with generally darker colors and a narrower range of saturated color reproduction. You don't have to be a color expert to see the difference.
For the R3000 the ink cost is about $1/ml which comes out to about $0.01 per square inch if you get it at a discount (search for "red river Cost of Inkjet Printing Epson R3000"). That makes a borderless 8x10 cost about $0.80 in ink, and a borderless 8.5x11" cost about $1 in ink. A sheet of Epson Ultra Premium Photo paper costs as little as $0.60 if you get it at a discount, so printing a borderless 8.5x11" ends up costing as little as $1.60 in supplies. (Not to mention that you can get third-party paper that's just as good or better than Epson's official paper for less money.)
The cheapest photo labs charge around $1.50 for an 8x10 (my local Sam's Club currently charges $1.46). If we use a whole 8.5x11 sheet of official paper and a full 8x10 worth of ink to print an 8x10, we get $1.40 in supplies per 8x10 which is slightly cheaper than even Sam's Club and significantly higher quality. Good third-party paper would be around $0.35/sheet meaning that you could also do as well as $1.15 per 8x10, maybe even better.
Admittedly though that doesn't incorporate the cost of the printer, which you won't have to incur if you just use a photo lab. If you bought the printer for say $800 and you've gotten your per-8x10 supply costs down to $1.15, then you'd need to print about 2,580 8x10's before your total costs started to get lower than Sam's Club's $1.46.
When you get larger than 8x10 though then the printer really starts to pay off. One place online that isn't too expensive and has a good reputation charges $6.30 for a 12x18 on glossy photo paper printed with a photographic lab process. It's possible to get decent 13x19" gloss ink jet photo paper (same stuff that costs $0.35/sheet for the 8.5x11) for about $1.50/sheet. 12x18" of ink costs you $2.16 so total cost for a 12x18 on the R3000 with that paper is $3.66. At that price you need to print 300 or so of these large prints before your prints start costing less than $6.30, and again the ink jet prints will have better color quality than the photographic process printer. You also have the entire lifetime of the printer to make all these prints that we're talking about. If you make on average about 10 8x10" prints every week then it would take about 5 years to make this cost back, but if you made two of the 12x18" prints per week then it would take about 2.8 years to brake even compared to the lower quality protographic process prints ordered online.
But none of these estimates take into account the value of the convenience and additional quality you get from having a modern photo inkjet printer right in front of you. Add in costs like transportation to pick up photos, time spent driving, any sort of cost of inconvenience by having to wait for prints to arrive in the mail, the additional value of better color quality, and other hard to quantify things then the real savings may be better. Depending on how much these costs add to the cost of photo lab prints, a decent ink jet printer like this might pay for itself much more quickly.
Still, you have to keep in mind that owning your own printer like this only makes sense if you're going to be doing a certain volume of printing. If you only ever print maybe 10 8x10s a month then the printer will never be worth it solely from a cost-per-print savings perspective. Also, if all you ever print is 4x6 then even just your ink cost without paper is going to be around 2.5x the cost of getting 4x6 prints made ata cheap online lab or drug store. So for small prints like 4x6 the printer will absolutely never pay for itself from the supply perspective, and probably not even from the convenience perspective.
The only problems I've heard of with this printer seem to involve priming the print head (pumping ink into the initially empty hoses that run from the ink cartridges to the print head, basically) and the printer going through unnecessary cleaning cycles, but Epson support is great about addressing these. My R3000 went though an unnecessary priming cycle when I first set it up, wasting about half the ink in the cartridges. Support got back to me in less than a day and offered to send me a full set of full replacement cartridges. I haven't seen anyone complaining of clogged nozzles or any of the usual inkjet problems.
The color gamut of the R3000 when used with the Ultra Premium Photo paper significantly exceeds the AdobeRGB colorspace in areas of dark blues and greens. This allows you to make the most of your camera's sensor capabilities IF you convert your RAW files into a format using the ProPhoto RGB color space (the most common one that actually holds those colors) AND print to the printer using proper color management with the appropriate ICC profile. Photo labs almost always require all files to be encoded as sRGB (which is smaller than both AdobeRGB and ProPhoto RGB), and printers like the Fuji Frontier have smaller gamuts than sRGB anyway, so they can't possibly achieve the wide range of colors that a high quality professional inkjet can when it's wielded by someone with sufficient color management skill.
Anyway, excellent printer, reasonable cost of ownership and operation, higher quality printing than you get at a photo lab, convenience, and excellent support from Epson. When you consider this part of your "digital darkroom" and compare its cost to the cost of materials and equipment you'd spend for an "old fashioned" film darkroom, the cost is quite reasonable.
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