Last year, my colleague David Zwang began a series of articles looking at the evolution of equipment manufacturers in the production inkjet space—how their portfolios changed and how customers have adopted those machines. As 2024 began, I thought it would be apt to do something similar for companies in the display graphics—aka wide format—market. So, first up, is Epson.

My relationship with Epson dates back to the late 1990s. When I was managing editor of the long, sadly defunct Digital Imaging magazine in 1999, Epson released the Stylus Pro 9000—which I reviewed for the magazine. These were the days when companies like Encad still ruled the wide-format roost and inkjet was just starting to muscle in on electrostatic wide-format devices. At the time, Epson was a top (if not the top) vendor in the photo printing and proofing market. The idea at the time, said Reed Hecht, group product manager of Epson America, was to “go and make Epson’s brand equal photo and equal proofing because that is our strength, with our technology and in developing these products.” The Stylus Pro 9000 was a 44-in. inkjet device and a landmark product for Epson. But there was one fatal flaw with the dye-based inks that were used in virtually all inkjet devices at the time: they faded —often very quickly.

“Dye-based ink had wide color gamut, but it wasn’t durable, and photographers were never going to accept it,” said Hecht. So, in 2000, Epson developed its aqueous pigment-based ink, which is still the basis for their inks. It’s hard today to understand what a game-changer pigment ink was at the time. (Henry Wilhelm at Wilhelm Imaging Research was on every writer’s Rolodex at the time, as his testing was the gold standard for image longevity.) That era also saw the first flowering of digital art, and some of the digital artists I spoke with at the time said that the advent of stable pigment-based ink meant they could display and sell their work knowing that it won’t fade for—potentially—100 years, as Wilhelm’s testing indicated. That was huge. For the photographers, who were still one of Epson’s core markets, it was also a crucial development. And not just for photographers—“but also for proofing,” said Hecht, “because proofing needed the stability of a pigment-based ink as well.”