Digital BW, The Print

In a message dated 9/14/06 3:05:02 PM, picnic@... writes:


> Well, I've been looking at the 2400 for several months but was also hoping
> that the Canon A3 pig printer would come out to have 'choices'.
> 
Since I don't have to purchase printers out of a personal entertainment 
budget, I lean towards the large cartridge models, so the two to compare are the 
Epson 4800 and the Canon iPF5000. Both have large carts so that you can do a run 
of prints without having small carts run out of ink in the middle. Both do 
great color and B&W output, with the edge for B&W linearity and color gamut 
going to the Canon. Its built less like a stand-based printer, and more like a 
desktop printer than the 4800 (more plasticy, less rugged) and is wider, with the 
12 ink carts, and can't take oversize carts (the 4800 comes with 110s, but 
can use 220s, the Canon comes with 130s, and thats the only choice). 

The roll feed on the Canon is an option, not a built in feature, but then, 
you can use it at the same time as the cassette, so there's some convenience 
there. The real convenience is the cassette itself. While each sheet must be fed 
to the 4800(7800/9800) one at a time (meaning production printing is roll 
only) the iPF5000 can have sheets stacked in the cassette. What papers will 
actually feed from the cassette, and what media settings the Paper Nazi will let you 
use from the cassette (yes, Canon has lots of Paper Nazi features in the 
driver too...) will determine whether this will work for you, or if you will be 
stuck feeding sheets from the single sheet slot at the back, which is prone to 
frequent (I'm tempted to say continuous) errors, which, for variety's sake, 
include Skew errors, to Paper Jam errors, to Cannot Detect Sheet Size errors. A 
good, flat sheet might take three or four tries to load... so I can't consider 
the sheet feed (which is the only option for thick and stiff sheets) to be 
production oriented.

So there are many factors to compare and consider (I only scratched the 
surface here) in deciding which printer fits your particular needs. Now we just 
need to find out if the other upcoming Canon models will have two grays, of if 
that second gray is one of the carts sacrificed...

C. David Tobie
Product Technology Manager
ColorVision Business Unit
Datacolor Inc.
CDTobie@...
www.colorvision.com


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