OCT. 12, 2007 - UPDATE:  I’ve been testing the printer off and on for a few weeks now, so I’ve added some additional thoughts.

The printer arrived early this week, and took about an hour or two to unbox, setup and get running.  It prints out a calibration page (fairly complex) as part of this process.  I’m assuming you can force the printer to do this when you feel a need. Surprisingly it comes with a very short roll of matte paper, I assume to print this page on.  It seems a high gloss paper may yield better results, but maybe not.  Apparently Canon engineers didn’t think so.

After setting it up, the first thing I tried to do was print something (obviously).  Canon sent a full roll of what appears to be a new media, and unfortunately the custodian tossed the empty box so I can’t even find the name of it.  It isn’t listed anywhere on any of Canon’s sites, as a media choice in the printer or driver settings, and I spent 30 minutes trying to locate a profile for it with no success.  It is very similar to some of their other media, something about Bright White satin, so I picked the closest thing I could find and ran out a test print.  ( I normally use the lab test page that I found on Bill Atkinson’s site).

So despite the challenge with the media type, it was fairly straight forward to load a roll, set up my mac and get a print made.  Bonjour seemed a little flakey on the first day, and I had to delete the printer and create it again a few times.  Not sure what the problem was, because since then it’s worked quite well.

Needless to say the colors weren’t very good (ok ... they were horrible).  But I had managed to get a print off in a relatively short period of time.  The printer driver overrides the printer on media and size choices without anything but a small warning on the printers display ... big improvement over the ipf5000.  It’s still a pain to have to set paper settings in both the printer and the driver, but there is some logic to it. When printing manual sheets, if the printer is online it will just accept what is coming from the driver.  There are still some quirks with the way the printer and driver work together.  It seems better than my experience with the ipf5000, but to be very honest it is still more difficult than printing with an Epson, but not to the point you want to pull your hair out.

To really test the printer requires some good profiles, and since I don’t use Canon media and the only good Canon media I had didn’t have a profile, I set about making profiles for 3 media types that I like to use with my Epson 3800 and 9800 printers.  I used Bill Atkinsons 4096 patch for Kodak Professional Lustre and Epson Premium Lustre, and used his 1728 patch to profile my new favorite art paper, Hahnemuehle Museum Etching ( is that hard to spell or what!  I still have to look it up every time).  Profiles were created with PM5 using an EyeOne UV cut and and EyeOne i0 table.

Bottom line ... outstanding prints.  Better results than I had with the z3100, and I believe an improvement over the ipf5000.  The memory of that is a little cloudy, but I think I have some test prints I made way back then that I may be able to use to compare.  I’m sure some reviewers will do direct comparisons, but my real interest was whether or not the Canon is really on par with the Epson.

I still need to do a lot more printing to be fair with this printer, but at this point I don’t have anything real harsh to say, so I think some preliminary conclusions seem OK.

First, my frame of reference must be against an Epson 7800/9800 series printer.  Unlike Canon that  just extends the overall printer and leaves out the paper tray, the Epson printers are designed differently than their paper tray desktop cousin, the 4800.  In most cases it isn’t a problem, but in a couple of areas, the Epson is definitely the winner.   These same reasons will not apply when comparing the ipf5000 against a 4800 or 3800.

Second,  I am comparing Canons newest technology and inks against Epson’s that are now one generation back.  My Epson 11880 has not arrived yet, and I’m not going to buy a smaller Epson printer to test out the new inks. (OK, maybe a 3880 if they introduce one).

When comparing the Epson Premium Lustre from both printers side by side, the are remarkably identical.  You have to look extremely close to find any differences ... akin to pixel peeping an image with photoshop.  Each print on its own is outstanding, has great saturation and color, and looks fantastic.

If you start looking very close you can see some differences.  The Epson has an edge in green detail in an area of mid-range to bright green tones.  The Canon seem to have an edge in transition detail is a few of the softer colors.  The color ramps appear almost identical ... the Epson might have a microscopic edge on a couple, the Canon on a couple.  On those ramps the gloss differential seemed to be very slightly better on the Epson, but that could be just the difference in the printing of the ramp resulting in slightly less ink at the white end.

Conclusion?  Print quality is probably not going to help you decide which printer to buy because they are both outstanding.

If you are deciding to buy a 24” or larger printer, the basic question you have to answer is whether or not you need to switch between matte and photo black inks.  There is no contest here ... the Canon wins without a fight.  Switching is transparent (happens based on the paper choice in the driver), and takes no ink.

However it may not be that simple.  There is one area the Epson printer certainly out does the Canon, and that is in paper handling.  This is the part I was mentioning earlier, and really only applies to the 24” and larger printers.

Epson’s design allows for a straight through paper path for all media printed ... including all rolls and sheets.  The sheet feed paper path accommodate any thickness of media without a problem and everything from bond to poster board is loaded and fed the same way.  This is especially nice when using thick art papers.  Even printing papers like Somerset Velvet on an Epson from rolls is not a challenge.

On the Canon if you are using rolls everything is pretty good, unless you are using thicker papers.  The path is not straight through and thicker papers can be a problem.  Sheets are not as easy to load, and the process of printing cut sheets, while manageable, is not as straight forward as with the Epson.  But when it comes to thick cut sheets, the Canon fails miserably.  This so far is my only major criticism of the printer.

There are two issues with using the front slot for thicker media.  The first is loading the sheet.  Currently you must set the printer to the POP paper setting, then it will prompt you to load a sheet in the front slot.   Instead of a nice clean attachable guide, there are four little tabs that you flip up, and each tab has an insert that you must use the sheet to flip backwards as you insert the paper.  The right tab’s insert has a guide to align the paper to the right side.  After you open the top to guide the paper under the printers interior roller, you then align the paper with the marks on the tabs.  Wow ... I can’t imagine there isn’t a better way.

After that the problem you face is you can only print to this loaded sheet using the POP setting in the printer driver on the Mac.  Thus you lose all control of ink densities, and in fact using my Museum Etching profile this way with a night scene yielded horrible blacks including some areas where it appears the ink nearly puddled.

I have yet to try the 16bit driver to see if I can get around this, but will do so.  Unfortunately the only way to use the 16bit driver is to run Photoshop inside Rosetta (did I hear a moan ... slow).  But for the sake of testing I will, since the Canon rep told me the Universal Binary version of the plug-in is coming soon.

UPDATE:  FIrst, I have found a way to use the front manual feed slot with other paper types.  To do this you must navigate the printers menu to the paper choice, and there you can find a setting on whether manual feed should be from the rear or front slot.  The printer driver doesn’t seem to care at that point.  If you end up using one of the special settings for two papers, one to feed from the rear and one from the front, you will have to manually change it each time.  Not horrible, but not the best, and not an issue at all for nearly all users.

The front manual feed slot isn’t the best, but it’s not that bad for thick media. After a few tries the Museum Etching loads quite easily.  Since thick media is what it’s designed for, I won’t criticize too much ... (except to say it could be better).

As far as print  quality, I really like what I’m seeing.  Currently I’m printing a lot of fall aspen shots, and I think the Canon is better than the 9800 for some of the unusual yellows I get sometimes.  Funny thing is the 3800 seems better than the 9800 for these same colors, and the 3800 and ipf6100 prints are virtually identical.  I’m unsure why this would be and have tried my profiles, Bill Atkinsons’s profiles, as well as Epson profiles on the 9800.

Anyway, great printer.  Guess I’ll hang on to it until Canon calls and asks for it back ...no need volunteering to send it back.