This is not our first wide format printer; this is our second.

Please bear with me on this a little - it is good reading - I promise:

Our first Wide format printer (which is in my garage now) was an Epson 9600Pro which is a 7-color 44 inch wide printer. I was never really excited about getting the Epson; not even when we first purchased it. I really wanted to get a ColorSpan DisplayMaker although we would have had to get a used one since new they were out of our budget. The Epson was recommended to us by my sister-in-law who worked for Epson at the time in their marketing department. She told us how great the printer was. Boy was she wrong.

We will never by another Epson ink-jet printer. We have owned 5 other desktop models and worked with numerous others at some companies I worked for. Most of the desktop models were free, or nearly free, with purchase of a computer and perhaps 1 or 2 were given to us by relatives. My sister-in-law used to tell me that Epson loved giving the printers away since they make tons of money on the inks cartridges so they want as many printers out there as possible.

Our experience has been that the heads clog constantly if you do not use them everyday and that you need to run multiple cleaning cycles in order to get them to hopefully work. Since the print heads are not replaceable (like those of the HP ink-jets) once they clog bad enough the printer is trash.

Now you on a desktop printer a couple of cleaning cycles may not be that bad as long as the heads clear. However, on these large format printers the ink is very expensive, around $110-125 per cartridge (now times that by 7 cartridges...) and so are the cleaning cycles. On ours we usually had to do between 3-5 cleaning cycles, an maybe 1 or 2 power cycles (this is the mother of cleaning cycles that uses 3 times more ink per cycle).in order to unclog the nozzles each time we used it since we would often leave it for a week or more at a time.

What does that mean - about $50.00 in ink every time we wanted to print. Then, we would usually have a clogged nozzle hit us while printing and ruining prints. Or leaving big black splotches on the prints - again ruining a good print. All this spelled out was four years of headaches!

So finally we bit the bullet and purchased a new printer. We chose the Canon for several reasons that I will discuss here. Before I do I should say that when the Epson worked it did make some very nice prints.

Now onto the fun - the new printer!

This time I got to choose what I wanted. I did some research between the HP wide formats and the Canon. I liked the HPs built in spectrophotometer and this almost swayed me to go with the HP. The Spectrophotometer is used to color calibrate the printer and keep output accuracy. I use a Mac for my output which has very good color controls and my prints do not need to be perfect from print to print either so I discounted this option for my needs - others may have a far greater need than I do for this.

Then I was informed that HP programs in how many ml of ink can be printed before the print heads, which are user replaceable as are the Canon’s, need to be replaced. The HP takes 6 print heads to the Canon’s 2. Each of HPs are about $65-70 each whereas he Canon’s are around $500-600 each. The HPs print heads also only have 1,056 nozzles per color whereas the Canon has 2,560 nozzles per color. Both the HP and Canon can detect clogged nozzles and if they can not be cleaned will remap other nozzles to do the work. With my experience with the Epson (which only has 96 nozzles per color for the 9600 Pro - although their new 9880 now boasts a whopping 180 nozzles per color!) print heads clogging I figured the more nozzles, with a system or mapping out clogged nozzles, the better.

I also looked at build quality. The HP is much lighter and did not seem as sturdily built as the Canon. The HP weighs in at around 143 lbs. or 200 lbs shipping weight. The Canon printer alone is 313 lbs. not including the stand! Shipping weight was 530 lbs. It took 4 people just to lift this printer onto the stand to fasten it.

One of the final deciding factors was ink cartridge capacity. The HP ink cartridges are only 130 ml each. And the HP ships with 1/2 capacity cartridges so you need to buy new ones faster. The Canon uses either 330 ml or 700 ml cartridges and ships with a complete set of full 330 ml cartridges. The larger capacity cartridges keep ink costs down.

I was sold. We purchased the Canon and had it delivered to the house. After about 4 hours of setup and playing we were able to make our first print. This included downloading the latest drivers from the internet just to make sure we had the latest and downloading and installing a firmware update for the printer just to have it on the latest as well. The start up process for the printer takes a little bit of time - once all 12 ink cartridges are installed it primes the system to get the ink to the print heads - this takes 20 minutes.

Well now the fun really begins. We started making some prints. We have not made too many but the ones we have made (on 3 different media types so far) have been excellent. The colors are vibrant and the black and grayscale prints we made show very good contrast and very stable blacks.

We are launching a business with this printer; which was the original intent 4 years ago when we bough the Epson but since the Epson was never reliable enough for us we did not get the business launched. Now we are.

The primary use will be to make 12 in. x 36 in. grayscale prints of old trains. We have some exclusive photos of about 30 different late 1800s early 1900s trains. These prints will be sold through hobby dealers throughout the world.

We will keep you posted on the printing progress.