Epson have been the market leaders in pigment ink inkjet printing for a decade now. They were first to market with the technology with the Epson 2000P and have been through several iterations since then. There's no doubt that both Canon and HP now also have interesting pigment ink options, but it's fair to say Epson remain the clear leaders in this field with a minimum of about 70%, through to over 95% market penetration in major markets across the world. This means pretty much all new inkjet products are designed and extensively tested with (and indeed optimised for) the Epson K3 line of inkjet printers.

Their current line up of printers use the Ultrachrome K3 inks (K3 indicating 3 blacks). These inks have been thoroughly independently tested (see Wilhelm Imaging in particular), and offer archival life spans averaging more than 75 years for colour prints (before visible fading occurs, if properly stored) - through to several centuries for black and white images. This makes this technology about the most stable colour printing technology available on the market today.

The K3 inks (and new drivers) were particularly improved in several areas. The most noticeable area was the new Advanced Black and White mode - which made it easy to achieve high quality, neutral, metamerism free black and white prints, for the first time. Combined with quality materials like Museo Silver Rag and Hahnemuhle's legendary Photo Rag, the results are nothing short of fantastic - and archivally sound, if stored properly, for centuries - life spans now clearly exceeding those of traditional chemistry prints. Not surprising, really, as the process is essentially black carbon based ink on cotton rag papers - the same process as Rembrandt's etchings, in a nutshell.

The other big noticeable improvement was at the edges of colour - much better behaviour with deep, saturated tones (as well as bright saturated tones!), meaning it was easier than ever to achieve superb quality colour prints with rich, accurate colour.