I just took delivery of a Canon Pro-2000 (see accompanying post for the (rather easy) setup tale), replacing an Epson 7900, and I've had Canons and Epsons over the years (never used an HP photo printer, but I've used a bunch of their GIS printers). I thought I'd post a bit about why I chose the Canon, and what I'd like to see in big photo printers going forward from the perspective of an individual photographer who prints actively, but not as regularly as a sign shop would - the Canon was (obviously) my choice of what's out there in late 2017, but I could see an even better design, although I'm not sure whether the economics are there to build it.
1.) Size - all current 24" and larger printers are big, heavy machines - The Canon is not especially long, but it's quite deep from front to back, and the Epsons are longer, although leaner. It's quite possible to build a 24" printer that isn't quite this big - Canon's iPF 6000 through 6400 were relatively svelte 12 ink pigment printers only a little over 100 lbs without the stand, while the new ones are closer to 200 lbs. HP once built a 6 (dye) ink 24" printer (the DesignJet 130) that was actually under 50 lbs, and even had a paper tray! Nobody's going to build a 12+ ink pigment printer that small, but they don't need to be behemoths, either (the size of the current models is largely to make them fast, and so they accommodate 700 ml inks). I can't see most individual photographers needing the speed, nor running 700 mi inks - I'm guessing that I'll only end up using a few 330 ml cartridges in my Canon (the Chroma Optimizer and maybe a couple of the high-use "light" colors) - the rest will be 160s.
2.) Roll and sheet feeding. The old HP DesignJet 130 was the only 24" printer I've ever seen with a multiple-sheet tray, and it was a great feature. The tray had a width restriction (I think it was 17", but it might have even been 13". Even a 13" tray would be useful - I once tried to run over 100 5x7" folded notecards on an Epson 7900 - what a waste of time... I now just send notecards and the like out, but it would be great to be able to run them on my own printer! The roll feeder on that old HP was a piece of junk, though - it wasn't powered, and it would barely run 170 gsm luster paper - don't even think about your favorite 325 gsm baryta or 350 gsm watercolor paper! The cutter was no better than the roll feeder, being a small, dull razor blade attached to the printhead. Both Canon and Epson have very good power roll feeders (and cutters) on their current models (to be fair, that's probably part of why they're heavy).
3.) Maintenance - unless someone can come up with a piezo printhead (Epson) that doesn't clog if left alone for a while, it should be a thermal inkjet (Canon, HP). Individual photographers don't tend to print in the same way commercial shops do, and piezo clogs are just a pain unless you run them all the time. Occasionally changing a Canon head (this printer is a day old, so I obviously don't know what its head consumption will be like, but other Canons I have known only ate a head every few years) is far better than occasionally changing an Epson printer! HP's head design is even better than Canon's - change only the colors you need... The idea should be a low-maintenance printer that works when you need it, even if it means one more consumable part...
4.)Speed - it doesn't need to be fast - we aren't sign shops. A big part of the size of current big printers, and maybe some of their head balkiness, is because they are designed for high speed and huge maximum duty cycles. Photographers worry more about meeting the minimum duty cycle of their printer than exceeding the maximum!
5.) Inkset. Both Canon and Epson have huge gamuts on their current line - they differ in their best colors, but both are good. Still, it would be possible to go even better, with a larger inkset (and it might be possible to improve permanence at the same time, by using less of the quick-fading colors). Canon and Epson agree on CMYK plus light versions of magenta, cyan and two light blacks plus a switched photo/matte black (Canon has nozzles for photo and matte, while Epson switches them on the same nozzles). Epson adds orange and green to this, while Canon adds red (similar to Epson orange), blue and clearcoat. For a 14 ink set, start with Canon's, then add Epson's green and one more light black (which both manufacturers have used, but don't feature in the mainstream wide format lineup) - or start with Epson's and add blue, the extra black and clearcoat. For 16 inks, one of the extras above 14 would be brown, while the other would be either a violet (which may be very similar to Canon's blue - already included), a deep red, or a fifth black. I'd far rather have 14 or 16 inks for a ridiculous gamut (and improved B+W) at the cost of being limited to, say, 200 ml cartridges than the capability of running 700 ml cartridges. A really clever engineer could even design a printer that had different maximum cartridge sizes in different channels - HP does this in a number of office printers that can take an oversized black cartridge. What if it could take 150-200 ml cartridges everywhere, but had extra-wide slots that accommodated 300 or even 500 ml cartridges for clearcoat, a couple of the grays and maybe something like light magenta (printers always seem to drink pink ink).
The problem with this machine may be economics. Since the manufacturers make their money off of sign printing shops and the like running through hundreds of rolls of cheap luster and gallons of ink in a year, there may be no incentive to build a printer that doesn't appeal to that market, no matter how good it is for the people who print 10-20 rolls of (non-manufacturer) paper per year. I wouldn't be surprised if we're buying printers at or below their manufacturing and transport cost, in hopes that we'll buy a ton of paper and ink. I pretty much know this to be true of low-end office inkjets, but I suspect it's true of wide-format machines as well, since most of them go for only a few hundred dollars more than the combination of ink and printhead that they include retail for (there has been at least one special where a printer briefly sold for less than the ink it included).
Dan
