Michael Reichmann at The Luminous Landscape has just posted a review of Canon’s new iPF5000 inkjet printer. This is of partcicluar interest because Epson has been the only game in town for fine art photographic printing until this March, when Canon and HP both announced their own offerings at this years PMA trade show. Now that there’s some competition, let’s see how they stack up!
Reichmann writes:
In May, 2006 Canon began shipping the iPF5000 printer. This is a 12 ink, pigment-based, 17″ carriage photographic printer capable of printing in 16 bit mode. It is physically large, moderately priced (for what it does), and, as will be seen, surpasses just about every other fine-art inkjet printer yet available, in terms of both image quality and convenience of features.
This review is based on three weeks of almost daily use of the iPF5000. By way of background, over the past 10 years I have been using a range of Epson printers, including, most recently, the Pro 5500, 4000, and 4800 models. These, especially the current Epson Pro 4800 model, will be my points of comparison.
Continue reading at The Luminous Landscape
I have looked at prints under both a high quality 3X Schneider loup as well as a 10X loupe. With the naked eye prints are definitely continuous tone, just as you’d expect them to be. Under a 3X loupe the dithering pattern is just visible.
[I left this comment on the off chance that it’s actually true. The name and link they left was spammy, so I’m not sure what’s up with this one. —Nicolai]