Product Reviews

Graphic arts hardware developers are increasingly moving towards adopting the smaller-and-more-often spend cycle of consumables, rather than the larger-but-less-frequent spending normally associated with hardware purchasing. So, you'd think that any manufacturer moving towards hardware that cuts down on consumables use would be shooting itself in the corporate foot. Not so, argues Canon's LFP product professional Shane Burchett: "Optimised ink usage is a great USP, particularly in the segment we're looking at, where we offer an excellent first entry into large-format printing."

Canon’s imagePrograf range is the canny result of the firm’s late entry to large-format printing; HP and Epson have historically divided the turf between them. The devil, as always, is in the detail and, in this case, that comes in the form of the inks, the media and the RIP. And that’s where Canon is claiming its market-beating advantage.

We analysed the technology and found that HP has a reputation for being very fast, but with poorer quality, and Epson has excellent quality, but is quite slow, says Burchett. Somewhat unsurprisingly, then, Canon has proceeded to devise a best-of-both-worlds large-format machine, the imagePrograf 6100, brought to market last year and now updated in the imagePrograf (iPF) 6200. The iPF 6200’s single point of difference from the earlier iPF 6100 is an 80Gb, rather than a 40Gb, on-board hard drive. Both machines offer what Canon feels is ‘best-in-bracket’ speed and quality, with 31% less usage of the Canon Lucia water-based pigment inks as an added bonus.

With regard to speed at least, it isn’t just Canon blowing its own trumpet: independent tests with US technology research company Buyers’ Labs Inc tested the Canon large-format machines against HP and Epson and found that the Canon’s speed beat its two rivals by some distance. With regard to colour, Canon’s own internal tests found that, according to Burchett, our colour gamut is comparable to Epson’s inks and, compared with HP’s inks, our Lucia inks give a much better gamut.

Intended for photographic, proofing and fine art use, the iPF6200 is a 24in or A1 printer (in metric, a 610mm width) with no less than 12 on-board colours that collectively read less as a list and more as a memory-teaser: cyan, magenta, yellow, red, green, blue, photo black, matt black, photo cyan, photo magenta, grey and photo grey. The ‘photo’ colours give more of a glossy finish than the standard inks, while the matt black works best with satin coated papers. Each is triggered automatically by the iPF6200 if you use Canon’s media profiles, which work not just with Canon’s own media, but also with specialist papers from other manufacturers.

It gives a wider colour gamut, having so many colours, says Burchett. But there’s a cost-saving too – this is partly how Canon users can cut down their ink usage by 31%. On a standard printer, you make up a red by printing a mix of yellow and red and you often end up using a lot of yellow, Burchett says. On our machine, you just print red. So you don’t need as much ink.

The final ink-related selling point that comes from having such a heavy tally of on-board inks has to do with resolution. For starters, the iPF6200 can deliver a huge number of dots per inch, namely 2,400x1,200. The printheads are Canon’s tried-and-tested bubblejet arrays, with a fixed droplet size of 4pl per colour and six colours in each of two heads. The tiny droplet size works together with the 12 inks to produce what Burchett calls smoothest-ever gradations of tone. It’s known in Canon-speak as ‘fine’ technology and, as Burchett points out, there’s another ink-saving angle here: a finer droplet size means that the iPF6200 can save more ink than its rivals, which use a fixed 8pl droplet size.

Are Canon’s bubblejet heads considered a consumable? No, we expect them to last the lifetime of the machine, Burchett says. All printheads come with a one-year warranty and Canon has an ongoing programme of tracking average length of life by reading the printheads’ integral chip to yield activity data.

The droplet size being so fine, the iPF6200 could easily be used as a halftone proofer: one of Canon’s resellers, the paper merchant Robert Horne, has in fact just begun to sell a bundle of a Vutek superwide-format printer and an EFI ColorProof RIP, with the iPF6200 as a proofer, although this is admittedly not a halftone application.

Being intended for fine art use, among other applications, the iPF6200 has the benefit of a built-in colour calibration system that takes around five minutes to run and brings the printer back into line with a set of factory-embedded pre-sets that, in part, help to compensate for nozzle wear and tear and misalignments. However, printers running pre-press departments shouldn’t jump for joy at the prospect of a super-low-cost contract proofer just yet: the calibration system will not accept profiles other than the one with which it comes factory-loaded –in other words, the profile to which the ink nozzles and delivery system are re-set as often as necessary.

The idea is that any printer or production house with a bank of iPF6200s can keep the entire bank in tune with each other. So, if the workload gets ‘balanced’ (i.e. split) between printers, the theory goes that you’ll get exactly the same output from the one as from the other. All Canon’s wide-format machines for the fine art, print-for-pay and photographic environments have the same calibration tools, it’s part of what allowed Canon to put in for, and earlier this summer be awarded, Fogra certification on some of the range. We didn’t include the 6200 in the certification programme, because at that point it didn’t exist, Burchett explains, pointing out that certification has been bestowed upon the all-but-identical iPF6100. So, it has the certificate for Fogra in everything but name. 

Another point that Canon claims over its rivals is the fact that the entire large-format range prints borderless, all the way up to 60in, so you don’t have to trim up offline, Burchett points out. And, potentially even better from a display printer’s point of view, is the fact that the iPF6200 can even feed rigid boards up to 1.5mm thick.

At the front end of the iPF6200, Canon makes a point of being what Burchett calls RIP neutral. We work with all the software developers, he explains. So we can hook up with whatever you like. This is likely to suit proofing
environments, where a one-bit TIFF might be kicked out by a workflow to the iPF6200 while being held online for later platemaking.

Included in the box is a raft of user-friendly software: Canon’s own PosterArtist Lite, a poster templating software; a Photoshop plug-in that enables an end-user that’s manipulating an image in Photoshop to print directly from that application; and Digital Photo, a Canon image capture application to take images direct from a Canon camera, manipulate and print directly from there.

As for the iPF6200’s reception, Burchett cites the many sales of its sibling, the iPF6100, as a good record. The current economic climate, he says, is working well for his product offering. Commercial printers who hadn’t previously thought about large-format printing, are now beginning to consider it, he says. In large-format, margins are quite a bit higher than with offset.

The price point of the iPF6200, he adds, is intended to encourage commercial printers to get into the large-format area at very low exposure levels. There’s a no-compromise argument: for speed it beats the HP, for quality it’s comparable to the Epson.

SPECIFICATIONS

Max speed
Draft mode: 1x A1 sheet in 1.07 minutes
Standard mode: 1x A1 sheet in 3.58 minutes

Max resolution
1,200x2,400dpi

Number of colours
12

Max image size
610x18m (roll-to-roll);        
610x1,600mm (rigid sheet)

Price
List price £2,495 including stand

Contact
Canon UK
01737 220000
www.canon.co.uk

THE ALTERNATIVES


EPSON STYLUS PRO 7880
The Stylus Pro series has been the acknowledged doyenne of photo-quality printing for the amateur and semi-pro market for many years. The 7880 goes head-to-head with the iPF6200 for imaging width, speed, ink type and resolution, although it’s a 10-colour only printer. A new ink-repellent coating is said to dramatically reduce nozzle clogging and Epson’s UltraChrome K3 inks includes a new formulation of magenta.

Max speed
Fine mode: 12.57 mins (508x762mm)
Super photo mode: 23.18 mins (508x762mm)

Max resolution   
1,200x2,400dpi

Number of colours 10

Max image size   
610mmxunlimited (roll-to-roll);
610x1,600mm (rigid sheet)

Price   
List price £2,395

Contact   
Epson UK
0871 4237766
www.epson.co.uk


HP DESIGNJET Z3100
HP is starting to up its game in the colour stakes with the addition of an on-board GretagMacbeth Eye-One spectrophotometer to the Z3100. In many other respects, it is a match for the iPF6200: same maximum resolution, uses HP Vivera water-based pigmented inks, a four picolitre droplet-size head and 12 colours in a split between two imaging heads. Rigid media can be printed up to 0.8mm. It can print borderless, too, and it’s faster.

Max speed   
Draft: 13m2 per hour 
Standard: 6.7m2 per hour

Max resolution   
1,200x2,400dpi

Number of colours 12

Max image size   
610mmx91.4m (roll-to-roll);
610x1,676mm (rigid sheet)

Price   
List price £2,190

Contact   
HP UK
0870 013 0790
www.hp.com