"He who marches out of step hears another drum." ~ Ken Kesey
Ran a pair of 4800's for years. Great printers but when they both went down and the replacement I bought arrived half doa we bought a T3270. As a disclaimer, Epson bought ours back. It wouldn't print films the same length. I'm guessing it was just a lemon, something wrong with the sensor/media feed likely. So other than that key issue we had, I think it's a great printer and you might not need all black to run it. It basically has a fixed pair of heads per color. Faster than the 48xx series and just as clean printing. Only five carts to deal with and you can nozzle clean them in sets v. all inks. If you run your dye black in the MK slot you can clean that head alone as needed and waste nothing else. The package Epson sells uses their OEM ink and their new OEM positive film. The film is nice, prints look good with OEM ink but they are not visually opaque and I have not received densitometer readings for it so that might be a leap of faith for some. The version of AR packaged with the printer is identical to the standard one, just only works on those Epsons. (epson will tell you otherwise) All black option is almost certainly turned off to discourage use of non-oem media. Upside of the system is full warranty support from Epson, which is good, and you could run OEM ink and use the unit for signage or other stuff around the shop. The T3270 can print poster board and a lot of different media but the OEM media is of course spendy from Epson. Or, you can buy a T3270 and run std AR on it with you choice of ink like with any printer and run all black. Get a squaretrade warranty on it in case epson cheeses out on the non-OEM excuse but I find they are not nearly as hard nosed about that these days. I have a full set of accessories up for sale right now if you end up going with the T printer.
I've been using the T3270 for the past several month with OEM ink. No problems, no clogs, and it prints fast and clean. Buy the large capacity black cartridge and the OEM ink cost is not bad. We use Accurip BlackPearl.
Confirmed... You can set it to use all 5 black cartridges. I would suggest keeping the color cartridges and printing from one channel. When using my old 4900, I have found that printing with one channel will give you a sharper print with better dots. Ink cost stays the same, you just have to replace the one cartridge more often. Also leaves open the option to print full color stuff.
Amberlith and Rubylith certainly were not black