Decent A3 printer being the Canon Pro 9000?

[RazorIX]

A few months ago I enquired about the Canon i9950 as being a good option for a great quality A3 printer. However, a lot of people mentioned the Epson R2400 pipping it to the post as an overall package - its main strength being print longevity even though the i9950 maybe having slightly better quality of print.

Well I've been sitting on the fence (not exactly true, I've just been really busy) for two months now and the Canon Pro 9000 is about to hit the UK shores (priced at £549 inc vat). The question I have now is - do you think this could be the one to go for as they have stated that print longevity is just as good as the Epson R2400 if not better? Its a bit of a misnomer considering the printer is not out yet (at least over here) but would like any feeback on this printer (ie is it worth it over the R2400 for an extra 40 pounds) or should I ignore possible marketing hype and go for the Epson?

Any feedback as always very much appreciated. :)

Mark

[coreypolis]

they each do different things well.

The epson is amazing on all types of surfaces, B&W, and matte images especially. Its archivalness is 2nd to none. It can print on roll paper and on cd/dvds

The canon, well since its not out yet is hard to say, but based on previous models and what is expected from it, is certainly faster, and produces more vibrant images, especially on glossy.

So it somewhat comes down to what will meet your needs better. Epson's are the industry standard for pros, and teh r2400 is an amazing printer. Its hard to say what the Canon can due yet, but if you print mainly on glossy papers and use standard sized papers, it may well be worth waiting for.

[DavidW]

Possibly the more interesting of the new Canon printers is the Pro 9500, which won't be around until either the end of the year or early next year. The Pro 9000 is a dye based printer, which is the next step from the i9950 (or i9900 in markets where Canon can't supply the CD-R tray for patent reasons). The Pro 9500 is a pigment based printer, which I believe is aimed squarely at competing with the Epson R2400.

This explains the results that coreypolis says - the Epson R2400 is true archival quality because of the pigment inks, whereas the i9950 is stunning quality particularly on glossy media (dye based inks are more prone to degradation over time, but have a wider gamut and can look outstanding on glossy media).


As coreypolis said, Epson basically are the industry standard. The R2400 has roll media capabilities (I thought it lacked a CD-R / DVD-R tray, which is a drawback in my eyes - though I'm not sure whether pigment inks are suitable for printable discs), and overall is a good package. I can only find two drawbacks - I don't believe it has a CD-R / DVD-R tray (unlike the R1800, which is similar in many ways, but uses an older ink technology than the K3 of the R2400), and you can't fit both the Photo Black and the Matte Black cartridges at the same time in the R2400.


The other thing I dislike about printers in this bracket is that they're hard to network. In my study, I really want the printer behind me, and the easiest way to do that is using a network print server.

I have a Canon i865 (which I really bought as a CD-R / DVD-R printer before I became interested in high end digital photography) with a PRICOM C-5100, which is the odd parallel port print server that's compatible with Canon's status monitor.

Unfortunately, the PRICOM seems to have been damaged in a storm - it works for a few seconds after you start it up, then the parallel port stops responding. I may try reflashing its firmware, but I don't think that's going to work, much as I don't think I've got anything to lose.

The PRICOM was an expensive buy (even second hand from eBay) and I'm loath to replace it as none of the current generation of printers don't have a parallel port. It's a dead-end product, even though it was Canon's official way to network their inkjet printers for many generations. If it wasn't for the networking issue, I would have gone for the i965, which is a better photo printer (6 colours as opposed to 4 - I don't make any use of the other strength of the i865 for high speed high quality monochrome output on plain paper, as I use a laser printer for that).


Are there any USB network print servers suitable for modern Canon or Epson printers around the i9950 / Pro 9000 / Pro 9500 or R2400 bracket? More expensive professional machines tend to have a network interface (certainly the Canon iPF5000 does), and many modern laser printers have a built in network interface, but networkability seems not to be of concern in all but expensive ultra-wide carriage inkjet printers (Canon iPF5000 / Epson R4800 bracket and upwards).

Maybe I'll land up buying a cheap generic USB print server and trying it with the Canon. If nothing else, it means I can use up the media and ink I already have for this printer - though I fear the status monitor won't work. Certainly the status monitor won't work with my HP JetDirect 500X - indeed, the printer won't even print reliably using the JetDirect. I have an old Axis print server, which is basically a JetDirect clone - but the status monitor won't work with that print server.


Whilst I didn't really want to spend any money on printers, I need to do something now because of the broken i865 based setup. This may be an opportunity to retire the i865 and my ancient HP DeskJet 1220C that I use for printing on plain A3 paper (which is ever so expensive to run, as it uses a tri colour cartridge).

For bulk output I already have an HP Color LaserJet 3800dtn (21ppm colour duplexing networked laser printer with three input trays), so I don't need to worry about regular office type printing.

What I'm after is something for archival quality photos, CD-R / DVD-R media and a small amount of A3 plain paper output. Is there one networkable printer that can do all this? £400-600 is around what I may be willing to spend - I don't have the space nor do I make enough use of the printer to justify something like an Epson R4800, but something around the cost of an R2400 might be justifable if I can replace both my existing inkjets.

My utopia would be a revised R2400 with the matte black permanently installed, a CD-R / DVD-R tray and the ability to fit a network interface. I don't think such a printer exists - but is anyone interested? I regard pigment inks and good colour management as a must.



David

[RazorIX]

Thanks for the advice David and Corey.

David - on an additional note i believe you can now buy a permanent ink flow system for the R2400 that includes... yep you've guessed it; a direct perma flow matte blank ink supply.

Its not made by epson but by a third party - I believe it is being advertised in some of the current crop of UK magazines at the moment for approx 299. If you can not find it let me know and I will try and dig up the article.

[Quad]

DavidW
Please don't get me started on printer servers. Junk Junk Junk. I ended up using an old laptop for the job. The printer servers drove me insane with their spotty performance.

I just got a i9900 printer and really like it. But it is a dye based printer so there is the fading issue. I am not choosing not to concern myself with the issue as all colour stuff is very non archival as far as I am concerned. Digital files are much more archival in that files will not fade as the inside of a web server has low exposure to UV ;)

[DavidW]

My answer may be the HP B9180, which has a built-in printer server, and gets round some of my concerns in the Epson R2400. The Pixma Pro 9500 remains vapourware, and the Pro 9000, which seems destined to launch before its pigment cousin, is not with us either, at least in the UK.


My experience is rather like yours, Quad. In the parallel age, there were decent network print servers available, and most features worked through them. I bought mainly HP printers and my main print server was an HP JetDirect 500X - a rather expensive three port beast.

Parallel based print servers weren't perfect. My Canon i865 won't work reliably on the 500X, and ink status monitoring wouldn't work with the Axis print server I had in my junk box. I finally found one of the PRICOM print servers on eBay that does allow the ink status monitoring to work on Canon printers, which was great whilst it worked. Unfortunately, it looks like that server has suffered some kind of hardware failure - it no longer works with the i865 or with an old LaserJet 6L which works fine on the 500X. When you power up the PRICOM it fleetingly it recognises the printer, then it goes to "Unknown Printer" and it won't print anything. I tried reflashing the firmware and resetting to factory defaults to no avail - I suspected all along it was hardware failure. I can't find an obvious way to crack it open without destroying it, and I expect the circuit board is a bunch of surface mount components that aren't commercially available anyway.

I'm loath to replace the PRICOM (even if I can find another relatively inexpensive one on eBay - I'm definitely not paying full price) as the rare PRICOM servers that do come availabl go for fairly high prices and parallel is a dead-end technology anyway.


USB print servers seem a real mixed bag. Most are unidirectional and, because there's no such thing as a universal printer interface on USB, only work with a limited range of printers (or at least are only guaranteed to work with a limited range of printers). This is retrograde - I had bidirectional networking with my HP DeskJet 1220C / HP JetDirect 500X combination six years ago.


As printers became more sophisticated, the best answer was an internal print server - either built in to the main PCB or on a slot-in card. This technology is mature in laser printers; my HP Color LaserJet 3800dtn has JetDirect Inside which offers all the features most users want from a JetDirect (if you really want Gigabit or IPsec, you can fit a JetDirect 635n, but I certainly don't need either on my printer even though I use both in my home office network).

I was a networking professional - I suspect my home network is rather more sophisticated than many people's. There's 24 cables to my patch panel. The switch is an L2 managed Netgear with multiple VLANs and some Gigabit. The main router is a ZyXEL ZyWALL 35 firewall / router, which runs multiple subnets on separate hardware interfaces - there's some multi-NAT, one subnet is no NAT and the ZyWALL has fairly comprehensive routing, NAT, firewall and logging options (I may install the IDP / AV option on the ZyWALL - I'm thinking about it). To get my ADSL to the ZyWALL I use a ZyXEL Prestige P660H-61, which splits my /28 netblock into a pair of /29s (one for multi-NAT, one for no-NAT operation on the ZyWALL's DMZ). I don't currently have a second Internet connection to the ZyWALL, though I have had a cable modem hooked up there as well. For wireless I'm using 802.11g with WPA-Enterprise using EAP-TLS against FreeRADIUS - I have set up my own CA for the certificates. The FreeBSD box that runs FreeRADIUS also runs Samba and when I get round to it, I'm going to put a jailed Apache and PHP setup on it, not least to do some work on Pekka's Exhibit Engine.

I guess you can say that I ask more from my network than many people. For me, I find it much better to have devices on my network.


As my thoughts have turned towards the HP B9180, I've continued my thinking in the B9180 thread (http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=224446).



David