2. The hardware arrives

One particularly interesting feature of this printer is the use of two different grey inks in addition to black. These Light Key (LK) and LightLight Key (LLK) named non-colour inks reflect the K in CMYK in more than a symbolic manner; they enable composing black-and-white prints almost without the addition of colour ink. Therefore, colour inks need to be added to B&W prints only for correction of colour cast and only in homoeopathic quantity.
This gives enough reason to expect an outstanding ability to produce black-and-white prints.

2.1. Contents of box and selection of paper media

The supplied box contained merely the printer along with a complete set of spare ink cartridges in addition to the already installed ink. Besides the extra ink, Epson generously supplied a large variety of paper media, some in A4 size and others in A3 size for this review. The exact paper types were:

Size DIN A4 (11.7 * 8.25 inch):

• Premium Glossy Photo Paper, wide colour gamut
• Premium Luster Photo Paper, medium semi-gloss with apparently highly isotropic texture, reflection and texture grain don't exhibit any preference versus viewing direction
• Archival Matte Paper, absolutely white and “dead matte” characteristic, no glance from any viewing angle, media is not acid-free
• Premium Semi-gloss Photo Paper, EPSON label imprinted on back side, fine grain texture, relatively matte compared to Luster or Traditional, most silky-smooth appearance
• Traditional Photo Paper, most glossy of the semi-gloss Epson papers, surface texture appears somewhat “brushed” in portrait direction (longitudinal structured), hence possibly less well suited for mixed presentations of both portrait and landscape format prints

Size DIN A3+ (19 * 13 inch):

• Premium Luster Photo Paper, see above comment
• Traditional Photo Paper, see above comment
• Water Colour Paper Radiant White, a paper with slightly yellowish tint and a texture that reminds me of the thick paper for watercolour paintings during school time. Not acid-free and not counting as “Fine Art” although you should feed it like Fine Art media
• Enhanced Matte Paper, same “dead matte” appeal as Archival Matte; actually at a very late stage of this review I learned there are two names for one product
• Ultra Smooth Fine Art Paper, the name indicates it already, this got to be the smoothest of all Epson Fine Art matte papers. No visible texture or preference for reflection, “dead matte”
• Velvet Fine Art Paper, a paper with a relatively strong texture which reminds me more of hand-made paper than anything velvet. Probably great for B/W portraits.
• I also received Premium Glossy Photo Paper in 16:9 aspect ratio, sized like a panoramic postcard (181 * 102 mm).

Since my review sample arrived with pre-installed ink cartridges, only the mains and data connections were necessary to come to a working state. Not even a five-minute exercise until operational readiness was achieved.

2.3. Printer driver basic set-up

If one connects a new device to a Windows machine, the driver wizard pops up. Upon recommendation by my EPSON representative, I did not insert a driver CD but downloaded the latest drivers from the EPSON website support section.
The minimum required part to be downloaded is the printer driver itself; select your operating system from the drop-down list and fetch the driver version with the highest version ID.
While you are there, also fetch the Print Plug-In for Photoshop (assuming you work with Photoshop or PS Elements, otherwise it is pointless).
And while you are still there, check if there are updated ICC paper profiles which may be of interest for you.
Unzip the driver and invoke the installation (locate and click Setup). Then follow the messages from the driver installation routine and the Windows wizard, which will probably pop up again once you printer is powered up again, as requested during the scan for attached printers phase.
At the end of the short lasting installation, the R2880 is set as default printer and ready for use. There is no need to reboot the computer. The majority of EPSON paper profiles are automatically installed during the printer driver setup. Updated or new profiles may be installed (or manually copied, to be precise) separately from downloadable ZIP files.

Windows7 (RC Build 7100) detects the attached printer and immediately performs a driver installation, leaving the user the impression that the downloadable EPSON driver is not required. Wrong. Win7 treats the printer like a vintage ESC/P print language device, which does by far not unleash the power of that printer. Just install the downloaded driver package; it works almost as fine as with XP and VISTA with the exception that the USB port scan of the installation routine did not detect the printer so I had to define the port manually. Slightly annoying, it was necessary to switch to the Windows control panel and remove the “EPSON ESC/P” printer from the list in order to make the R2880 appear properly. Hopefully this nuisance disappears from Win7 before the final version starts to sell.

For users of Photoshop, the free Print Plug-In is a very nice tool, a must-have in my opinion.
On my machines, I installed it for both CS4 and Elements 6. In case of doubt, the software should be installed in the “Automation” folder of Photoshop and will be accessible under “File - Automation - Epson Print Plug-In”.
It runs as a stand-alone application, fetches the selected pictures into its browser panel (the leftmost window) and that's it for the moment. I must admit, the appearance of the Print Plug-In is, at first sight, just as puzzling as the first launch of Photoshop. Lots of switches, checkboxes, dropdown lists and no clue what to do next.
Well, I will have to find my way through it by means of the help file, I suppose. Thanks to EPSON, the brand new Whitepaper provides all instructions needed to get going and I will add some in paragraph 3.2...

2.4. Starting up the printer and initial test prints

Basic printing should not be a problem for anybody. It starts to get challenging when a particular image needs to be transferred onto paper while retaining the same striking appeal and emotion as when you see it on the monitor. It takes quite a lot of steps to perform that task satisfactorily, where colour management and colour gamut of the involved devices are of key importance.
This review is not meant to provide a turn-key solution to setting up colour management and enable printing all sort of pictures flawless, however it is my goal to provide some recipes for success.
Please have a look at the recent EPSON Whitepaper on Printers of the UltraChrome K3 ink family, which guides you through the cliffs and shoals of colour management settings in the bespoke software.
It is quite essential to work with proper colour management settings throughout the entire chain of image capture and processing. The main reason is the mismatches in colour gamut between most monitors (sRGB colour space) and ink printer capabilities. Relative to sRGB and AdobeRGB gamut, ink printers fall short in reproducing saturated cyan/blue and magenta colours; this is why blue skies often appear much paler on the print than on the monitor. There are ways to bypass that problem, which I will discuss later. Also relative to sRGB colour gamut, ink printers exhibit extended green-yellow colours, covering about the same range as the AdobeRGB gamut. Basically, it makes sense to work in AdobeRGB colour space rather than sRGB colour space in order to exploit the full gamut provided by the printer.

Here you see a colour gamut visualization of sRGB and two R2880 paper profiles:

EPSON Stylus R2880 - Paper Profile

Before wasting the first sheet of paper, I ran a nozzle check on the printer. It turned out that numerous nozzles of the cyan (C) and Light Key (LK) ink were in bad state. In total, the printer reported three ink cartridges as almost empty: LLK, LK and C. The driver utility refused to perform a nozzle cleaning session, so I had no alternative other than exchanging the empty cartridges.
Cartridge exchange is quite easy, just follow the EPSON instructions. Press the middle button with the droplet symbol, open the top lid and wait for the carrier to reach parking position. Unlatch the lid and extract the cartridge which is indicated by the flashing LED. Fetch the replacement cartridge and shake it well while the vacuum bag is still unopened. Shaking mixes pigments and solvent nicely and ensures that potential pigment cluster formation due to storage is dissolved. Then, rip the vacuum bag, remove the yellow tape flag and insert the cartridge. This is a clean exercise since the ink outlet of the cartridge is still covered by a transparent foil. Don't remove that one, it gets automatically perforated when the cartridge is inserted.
 
After ink replacement, I repeated the nozzle test twice, hoping that I might get away with that but there were still missing lines in the test print. So I invoked the nozzle cleaning, knowing that this spills ink which is wasted forever. That helped, the final nozzle test confirmed all nozzles to be working as expected. Of course, for nozzle maintenance, regular copy paper is the best choice.

All together, it took me six nozzle test cycles and one cleaning cycle to be confidently prepared for the first real image printout. Since such nozzle problem never re appeared during the evaluation period, I assume this was triggered by the transportation with empty cartridges, possibly allowing air to penetrate the print head.