Canon Imageprograf 300 Review

[Pelagio Bosch]

Canonhas taken a great leap forward creating a whole new generation of their aqueous printers that have some exceptional features. Now that the Canon Pro-4000 has just started shipping, I thought I would highlight a few features that I found significant.

The Pro-4000 has a similar cut sheet loading process that the previous Canon iPF printers had, along with the same curved paper path. While this makes the use of rigid materials impossible, I have been able to use large sheets of heavy papers without a problem.

Touch screen color display

Gone are the days of the dinky little screen with dedicated buttons around it. This printer has a phone sized, touch sensitive color screen with beautiful graphics and illustrations. There is also a long skinny light above it that changes color indicating the printers status. This light is white when printing normally and turns red when the printer needs attentio which you can easily see this from across a large room.

Wifi

Todays wifi networks are super fast and the large format Pro-x000 printers include built in wifi network connectivity. USB and ethernet ports are also available. An extra USB port in the front allows you to print from a USB memory stick and printing from a tablet or phone is supported over wifi.

Basket

Large format printers have always had flimsy baskets with limited functionality but the basket on the Pro-4000 supports 7 positions including several at paper feed height. I like the positions that function not as a basket but as a ramp to gently guide prints to a work table.

Spindles and core adapters

Canon has always had funny, unintuitive 3 inch core adapters for its spindles that were difficult to get on or off. The new spindles and adapters are smart and easy to use, and the locking mechanism now works perfectly.

Print Quality

The print quality has been is improved. While some of these improvements can be quantified, many of them cannot. The chroma optimizer, dense screening and thinner pigment encapsulation produce a number of visual improvements that are difficult to describe. The sheen on glossy papers, appearance at a variety of angles and under different lights, appearance of depth and saturation are all improved in ways that one needs to see for themselves to fully understand. A few points that I find meaningful:

When the color gamut and Dmax values are compared to the previous printers in applications like Colorthink the results are very similar to the previous generation printers. The gamut is a little smaller in the greens but larger in some other areas. Visually however, prints of the same image appear to have richer blacks, more shadow detail, a little more color saturation overall. For the first time in my career I feel like color gamut rendering comparisons don't tell the full, objective story like they used to.

Prints on non-matte papers have a more consistent, more desirable sheen on them thanks to the new clear Chroma Optimizer. Less gloss differential translates into better looking prints with less of that 'inkjet' look to them. As with the previous Canon inkset, the new inks are surprisingly durable and resistant to scratching, relative to other brands.

While macOS users will enjoy an entirely new, written from the ground up driver, Windows users have two drivers to choose from corresponding with Microsofts transition from the GDI to XPS printing architectures. The Windows GDI driver is feature complete but lacks support for 16 printing (a GDI limitation). The newer modern XPS driver supports 16 bit printing but lacks some of the smaller functionality of the GDI driver (like Free Layout). Thus are the tradeoffs to deal with while developing driver for Windows during this transition.

Fifteen years ago the driver APIs were so primitive that printer manufacturers were limited with what features they could implement. When Canon created the PS plug-in, they overcame these limitations and were the first to introduce 16 bit image delivery to a printer, with up-sampling and sharpening controls, long print lengths, and lots of additional printer controls that the printer driver APIs could not handle at the time.

Print Studio Pro

Canons Print Studio Pro is promoted as a replacement for the older printing plug-in. I think this is a bad analogy in part because the old Plug-in communicated directly to the printer without the driver and its limitations. Print Studio Pro prints through the driver and honestly, I struggle to see where PSP could fit elegantly into my clients workflows. PSP offers some novel color adjustments, limited layout capabilities and gives Photoshop users a way of printing multiple images simultaneously. Despite this, the interface is clunky and I fail to see this being the right fit for todays professionals. Those that need to manage, layout and print lots of images simultaneously have already migrated away from Photoshop and towards apps like Lightroom, Capture One, ImageNest, Qimage and various RIPs. Looking at the bigger picture, I think it is important to find the best app for your workflow and printing from that app (and probably through the driver) makes sense.

Cutting Mechanism

Canon printers have always utilized a rotary blade, and in recent models, a dual rotary blade where two opposing disks rotate at the cut point. The new Pro-x000 printers have a separate carriage mechanism just for the cutter which is strong and capable of printing the thickest canvas and cotton papers papers. This keeps cutting dust away from the print heads, places the cut closer to the paper exit point, and separates cutting resistance from the print head carriage where extreme head placement accuracy is so critical.

Processing

With 3 separate processors and 3 gigs of RAM, these new printers have a lot of processing power that comes in handy for all sorts of things. Lots of the rendering that was previously being done on your computer at the driver level is now being done on the fly on the printer which speeds up spooling times. Postscript, JPEG and other file formats are natively supported on the printer now which in part, allows people to print straight from phones, tablet, or a USB flash drive. Full 16 bit image processing ensures the smoothest possible tonality and color transitions. This processing power and RAM also allows Canon the potential to roll out substantial changes/updates/capabilities to the printer via firmware now and into the future.

Reliability

Several years ago Canons facilities suffered damage from a tsunami which forced them to shift manufacturing temporarily to partners in China. This caused reliability issues especially with print heads (a particularly challenging part to manufacture with extreme precision and consistency). Canon has built new, state-of-the-art facilities in Japan and Thailand that are fully operational now. Inks and print heads are manufactured in Japan while the rest of the hardware comes out of Thailand. Because of this and improved designs, materials and manufacturing processes, reliability is expected to be higher than what we have seen in the past.

Little Annoyances

Like every printer on the planet, there are little things that can delight or annoy. The Pro-4000 takes 32 seconds to wake up, which can feel like a long time when you are excited to print. After completing printing to a cut sheet, the printer forces you to wait 36+ seconds before it releases the print. After completing printing to a cut sheet, the printer cuts immediately but forces you to wait 36+ seconds before it is ready to print again. The new MCT tool only updates the media on the printer itself, requiring a second step using another app to pull the updates from the printer to the driver.

Conclusion

The more I use this printer the more I like it. The hardware and software represent a whole new generation of technology from Canon and the results look and feel impressive. A Canon 8400 looks and feels 10 years old next to this printer. I am impressed that Canon has been able to leap forward so far with this generation and overcome limitations that have lingered for years. I am in awe of the paper handling and ability to seamlessly switch between rolls without user intervention. The speed and print quality are fantastic and I am seeing more shadow detail on baryta papers than I have seen from any printer in the past. This printer is quiet, fast, compact and smart.

I have been working with Canon on this issue and discovered this in my own testing a few months ago and have been getting much better prints ever since. Really excited to regain confidence printing to non-matte papers.

Scott, as usual your review of the Canon 4000 was very well done and thorough. You review of the Canon 8300 and HP z3200s were excellent back in the day and I bought both and still use the HP daily and the Canon died last year after like 8 years of trouble free constant use. I miss it so much for production work. It was built SO well.

But there are two things you did not get into with the new Canons which are critical for me. I do a lot of clean neutral monochrome on all kinds of art papers and have had bw prints made by big labs in NY, Toronto, etc from my subtle full range file and the new Epsons and the new HP Z9 are excellent for bw while the Canon 4100 is just plain terrible in both neutrality and bronzing on the Canson Platine I use for half of everything. These were from very precise large target rgb profiles . Canon still has NO decent bw software solution after all these years. They used to allow Bowhaus company in LA to write True Black and White software which was excellent on my 8300 ( but not as good as my Z3200) but now there is nothing. In addition they have dumbed down the longevity of their Lucia Proinks by 1/3 of what the original Lucia inks were. That puts them at about 1/3 of the longevity of the current Epson and HP inks. You can check this by Aardenburg Imaging the best fade test source, as well as Wilhelm Research . This is unusable to me as well as I specialize in fine art museum quality work and in a bright public display over time you are in trouble fast. I just can not figure out why they did this and also ruined the green ( to include a dysfunctional go ) which for landscape photography is the most important hue!

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