I’ve had seven Epson large format printers and several desktop units within the last 20 years, 2 Hp Z printers, and one 44 inch Canon .
The Canon have in the past been by far the most trouble free by a big margin foe me, followed by the HPs which have been excellent and one of them I’m still using after 12 years. The onboard spectro On the Zs is a big deal And totally trouble free which surprised me. The Hp printheads are very inexpensive and user replaceable and they last a long time. Now the same head works for all the channels which is very cool. The most recent series Epsons look impressive to me IF the print heads last longer than the previous series and you keep them in warranty.
The new Canon 4000 Lucia Pro Inks are the least permanent, 1/3 less the longevity of the new Epsons. But I see very few complaints about anything regarding them ( except for bw) and they seem to be very trouble free and fast. You replace the head yourself in 10 minutes every year and a half to two years at about $500.00. In other words, when the head needs replacing you don’t have to debate whether to replace the whole printer. If you really care about black and white I think you might have no choice but to go with HP or Epson, at least that’s what I’m hearing. I don’t have a Canon 4000. It doesn’t look like they are going to update their software.
It looks like the new Hps still have some software issues to be dealt with by them, such as the gloss enhancer not covering adequately on fiber gloss media, and the new spectro is set up for only 400 patches. They need to update that situation, maybe with firmware, to at least 1200 patch targets. If they fixed those two things I would go with the Z9. Otherwise I’d go with an Epson now that I’ve heard about the poor bw performance on the Canon.
But if bw and longevity less of a consideration the Canon is a very nice system.
I also will agree that all the Z printers have the best bw output on all media and automatically linearized as well as the auto rgb icc profiles. The fact that you linearize the media in a separate step from the icc profile is a wonderful feature and you don’t need any extra profiling software to do it. You can produce great neutral bw with no color inks at all on the Z3200 and I believe the Z9 is similar. Having said that, the new Epsons with the blacker blacks and the black density overcoat, auto black switching, and much improved linearity and neutrality of the ABW mode is a big improvement over the 9900 series. You have to use more color inks for neutral work, but they still work very well and have very good longevity.
The new Epsons have probably the best color gamut ( followed closely by Canon) and much better permanence than the new Canon inks, basically what the older Canon inks had.
For black and white with QTR or Studio Print software, and their much improved ABW mode, Epsons will be more subtle than the Canon by far, because you can’t use True Black and White software anymore on the new Canons.
If you print everyday the Epsons might work very well for you provided you budget to keep them in warranty. All it takes is loosing one single color channel and that’s $2,000.00 US $ for a head replacement. There are lots of
posts on this site with people describing their experiences with all of these.
John
HP. I've had 3 HP printers, a Z3100 and 2 Z3200's, one of which i recently purchased. The built in spectrophotometer is amazing and the B+W output is great. The new HP Z9 is much faster than the Z3200. I have had mine sit unused for a year, never a single clog and the print heads last a long time and are reasonably priced and user installable.
