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PRINTER TEST:
Canon’s New Printer
Contends for Best Inkjet
With 12 inks, the ImagePROGRAF iPF5000 offers top-quality color and B&W
by Paul Schranz

After going through several generations of improving its printers, Canon has finally hit the market with a major contender, the ImagePROGRAF iPF5000, a 17-inch wide desktop printer. I use the term “desktop” with tongue in cheek, because the printer is an absolute beast, measuring 32¥39 inches with the roll-paper (optional) holder attached—and that’s its size with the tray extensions closed.

Why so big? The answer lies in the number of inks and the size of the ink tanks. The ink tanks are 130ml (the tanks that initially come with the printer are only 90ml). The tanks are a little bit large, but that alone does not explain or justify this printer’s behemoth size. The answer is in the number of inks required for the iPF 5000—12!

Huge inkset
As you start counting your subtractive primaries and add some neutrals, you still fall short of a dozen. The iPF5000 has CMY, plus a light cyan and light magenta. It does have two blacks: one a photo black, the other a matte black. Both are simultaneously loaded and accessible; which is used is determined by the type of paper chosen in the software.

The Canon ImagePROGRAF iPF5000.

Canon is obviously making a big push for the professional fine-art print market, because the iPF5000 also has a gray and a light gray. That brings us to nine inks. The remaining three are pretty ingenious. Instead of using your magenta and yellow inks to make red, and your cyan and yellow to make green, and your cyan and magenta to make blue, Canon adds red, green, and blue tanks, thus giving the iPF5000 what Canon says is the largest color gamut on the market. A set of twelve 130ml inks costs about $900 to replace, but the use of the primary colors actually cuts down the price of printing to about $1.30 per square foot. The single 130ml tanks are $75, roughly comparable in price-per-milliliter to other inks.

User friendly
The iPF 5000 is easy to use. It actually has four paper-feed systems: a cassette that fits in the bottom, an optional roll feeder on the back, and front and rear single-sheet feeders. The roll feeder holds 17-inch-wide paper, as does the cassette. You can load one type of paper in the cassette, another on the roll, and load a third type without having to reconfigure the printer—just choose the paper using the printer driver.

Speaking of software, where Photoshop has you choose whether you want the printer or Photoshop to set the color management, Canon takes a different angle. Start as you normally would, working on an image in Photoshop. When it’s time to print, you can use the Canon Export plug-in (which prepares a 16-bit file to print in the 12 bits the printer offers) if you intend to use Canon’s paper/ink combo. Canon will eventually market more than 30 types of substrates for this printer.

However, as I write, not many of the Canon papers are available, though the printer started hitting the streets a month ago. While availability seems to be improving weekly, I had to use MediaStreet, Innova, Moab, and a limited number of Canon papers to test this printer. What made this solution easier was creating my paper profiles by using my GretagMacbeth Eye-One Photo and saving the profiles on my computer.

Before going to the Canon Photoshop Export plug-ins, I take my image and select Edit > Convert to Profile in Photoshop, choose the paper profile I’m going to print on, save the image with the paper profile embedded, and then send the print to Canon’s plug-in. (It actually takes a lot longer to write these directions than to do them.) When you load a color image, you don’t change profiles, because the profile for the paper is embedded in the file. You don’t need color management after this.

Print quality
When you Convert to Profile, don’t convert a 16-bit image to 8-bits because the iPF5000 can print 16-bit files. It’s actually 12 bits, converted to 16 bits, but that is 12-bit times 12 inks, a significant increase in tonality and color fidelity over 8-bit printers. Compare the results, and you can easily recognize the difference in print quality.

Lobos 02030. The iPF5000’s extra inks—including red, green, and blue—give it a wide color gamut.
Union Terminal. The Canon iPF5000’s extra grays make for excellent black-and-white prints.

Depending on your personal preference for quality versus dispensing of ink, you can choose to print at resolutions as low as 300 or 600 dpi. Another variable, the paper you choose, will offer you a selection of 6, 8, 12, or 16 passes of the print heads (depending on how much ink your paper can take) for an unbelievably smooth tonal scale and rich, full coloration.

This improved print quality comes from several components. One is Canon’s new Lucia inks, a pigment ink covered with an extra polymer compound offering resistance to humidity, water, and fading. Wilhelm Research is still testing the ink’s permanence, but Canon has been told by Wilhelm Research that preliminary results indicate at least 100 years. Tests are ongoing.

The print head itself has a density of 15,360 nozzles at four-picoliter size. The head has automatic cleaning and compensating for partially operating jets by redirecting other nozzles. How can it do this? Because it doesn’t have just one head, it has two, for a total of 30,720 nozzles. Each head has a resolution of 1,200 dpi. With two heads, the maximum resolution is 2,400¥ 1,200. Unlike the heads on most other inkjets, these are user-replaceable. The technology is called FINE (Full PhotoLithography Inkjet Nozzle Engineering), which beats the name “Bubblejet.” Inks can be swapped out and replaced mid-print without a loss of media, and the roll holder actually monitors the amount of ink left. The printer also maintains knowledge of the environment (temperature and humidity), as well as ink data and controls the transport and writing mechanism accordingly.

The printer, with USB and no roll-feeder, sells for $1,945. The roll-feed adapter is an additional $295. An optional Firewire IEEE 1394 interface is available for $235. The iPF5000 does have a built-in Ethernet card.

The printer offers much to please fine-art photographers. For black-and-white printing, you can choose the Monochrome Mode, a series of three achromatic inks that should produce no color shift or metamerism. Even in Monochrome Mode, you can add a warm or cool tint.

The tonal range is staggering, and the prints look almost as though they were contact printed. (See the review of Exposure software in this issue if you want to add the appearance of grain.) The prints are unbelievable, with a richness and depth in all primary colors that I have not seen before.

Objective tests with a reflective densitometer showed matte papers to have a maximum reflective density of 1.50 to 1.57, with MediaStreet and Moab Entrada papers having the greatest density. The papers were all tested at six passes. At a 16-pass setting, density increased about 5%.

I tested a number of other papers in gloss, semi-gloss, and matte. The Canon RC Semi-Gloss at six passes had a maximum density of 2.18. When tested at 16 passes, maximum density jumped to 2.30. Using the same paper on a Canon 6400 pigment printer, maximum density was only 2.08.

The Canon Semi-Gloss RC paper has one of the finest non-matte surfaces I’ve ever worked with, but the 17-inch paper is currently unavailable. I hand-cut mine from a roll of 24-inch that was available. While it looks a little like the Canon Satin, the paper base is thicker.

Conclusion
The iPF5000 printer is a real epiphany for Canon, offering top-notch state-of-the-art technology for producing the best output for the discerning artist. I would not be surprised to see this quality technology show up in other Canon printers, bringing Canon into a real leadership role in quality printing.

Paul Schranz, a PT contributing editor, is a professor emeritus at Governors State University in Illinois. He lives in New Mexico, where he leads workshops and works on exhibitions.

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