WOW!  This is totally unexpected.

Roy Harrington (author of QTR) reported last week

“Interesting development. I got a hold of a 7900 briefly so I could try the QTR driver. — the method was just to use the 7880 driver and print a calibration page — Anyway printing at 2880dpi seems to work as expected, but both the 1440dpi and 1440super modes printed expanded output (twice as wide as expected). So the good news is we have something working, but its not completely compatible. Whether the 7890 has the same result is another question. If we can only print at 2880 I think that would be workable. These new printers are faster already.”

Roy later added “I just used the 7880 driver so no I couldn’t try orange and green. Actually selecting the inks is probably not a big problem but I do have to figure out any issues with more than 8 inks. For instance the inkseparation page uses 8 bits for ink selection. I’d probably put this off until later — who really needs that many inks for B&W.” 

and

“I have looked at the 4900 and is apparently all Esc/P2 so should not be a problem except for the 8 ink -> 10 ink issues. Haven’t looked at the R3000 but I’d think its like the R2880 except for the K ink selection.”

This is obviously very hopeful news from Roy Harrington. It seems that Piezography K7 is going to be easily managed on these printers. But, if we can get the O and G channels working, we will plan dual Piezography ink systems and perhaps triple quad ink systems using multiple curve blending. I would hope that the news continues to be positive coming from QTR.

It’s like Christmas in March from our side. We do plan to continue our work with Canon. But, this is wonderful news to know that even while Epson pressured ErgoSoft to remove the K7 compatibility from their StudioPrint RIP, Roy Harrington is able to adapt to these new printers on his own. This says a lot about the spirit of third parties working outside the established OEM systems. Keep your fingers crossed.