Apparently, according to Scott Martin’s review, which I trust because as a consultant he deals with these issues every day professionally, the correct media setting is critical on the new Canons to achieve the best gloss differential and bronzing reductions on fiber gloss media. It also seems true that Canon was not very clear in the beginning about describing that situation of choosing the best media settings for various papers
In my previous post, I wanted to be brief in terms of our basic findings with respect to the Canon printers (iPF2000 and 4000). Now, I see that I should have included more detail.
To provide a bit of background, my commercial printing company has been in business in Toronto for 35 years. As a long time photographer, I have been primarily focussed on the fine art inkjet printing end for the past 15 or so of those years. That started with an Iris inkjet and moved eventually to Epson. We currently own five large and medium format Epson printers. But, we decided to look seriously at the Canon Pros before our next printer purchase because we are tired of similar frustrations as those which have been widely published here and on other forums with respect to the nature of Epson printers. In truth though, in general, our machines have operated well overall and they have been treated very well.
We approached Canon with enthusiasm, since many aspects of their printers are impressive and apparently superior to the Epson machines. That said, the longevity testing of the Lucia Pro inks which showed poorer results from the previous set and much poorer by comparison to the Epson inks was a big concern. Nevertheless, we would be willing to tolerate that with the one machine provided that everything else in terms of image quality was at least as good as that which we currently achieve from our Epsons. Our primary concerns are the overall quality, accuracy and longevity our prints.
So, Canon took us through their new, impressive office building in Brampton and we met their printer experts in the demo room. We asked them to print a set of test files for us. We would print the same test files at our studios on similar papers. The test files consisted of a set of Roman-16 images in 16 bit ECI RGB, 24 Bill Atkinson's Balls in 16 bit ProPhoto RGB and an in-house test file created by us in 16 bit Adobe RGB. Print resolution was set to 300 ppi for the Canon tests and 360 ppi for the Epson tests.
With respect to the gloss optimizer and any finicky aspects of its handling and treatment, that was entirely in the hands of the Canon print experts themselves. They printed their files and we printed ours. Also, we told them up front of our particular concerns with respect to bronzing, gloss differential and colour fidelity and accuracy. So, all of our concerns were spelled out up front.
When we received the first test prints, the results were NOT good at all. In fact they were BAD. The cyan was not even close. Reds were weak, greens were dull, magentas were off, yellows were weak etc. on both the test sets - one on gloss and one on matte stocks. As I mentioned in my first post on this topic, if we had to rely upon that test, the Canons were out and that was that. But, we persisted because we know how easily errors are made and we needed to understand if these bad prints were due to the equipment or some other anomaly. I contacted their print expert who told me that they had used "
canned profiles" for their Canon papers. As I sad, we really wanted the Canon products to work out. So, if there was a chance this thing could work, we wanted to know and the help it happen, if possible. So, we offered to generate custom profiles for all the papers used in the tests. They happily agreed.
We had them print charts for our Isis-2 and Barbieri spectros consisting of 5207 patches with an abundance of neutrals. These were read and optimized and ICC profiles returned to Canon.
The next set of test prints came in
much better than we had anticipated. We couldn't believe they would run tests using such deficient profiles. Nevertheless, the new prints were stunning and in much closer agreement with our Epsons. On gloss papers the gloss optimizer really adds huge optical impact to the resulting prints even though the d-max was almost the same as that from the Epson. However, the overall result was not better than the Epson,. The oranges and greens were very slightly weaker and gloss differential and obvious bronzing was a deal breaker.
At the end of the day, the Canon machine was more money, the ink longevity was half or less, the bronzing was obvious and while our Epsons are not perfect we have not encountered the level of frustration that many others have. Hence, we have stuck with Epson in hopes that another contender arrives or Canon soon builds upon the strengths of their new printers. In our view, Canon and Epson are the only serious inkjet printer manufacturers.
Mick
