Canon Pro 10 v Epson R3000 thoughts

[Tin Ho]

Professional grade Epson print heads are actually extremely durable. Many industrial printers printing with solvent oil based printers pretty much all use electric piezo print heads exclusively. Clogging does occur no doubt about it. I have seen one such printer in development phase designed for printing RGB color mask for LCD displays running cleaning cycles. It was programmed to repeat the cleaning repeatedly thousands of times with a specific solvent. They said it was a maintenance routine done periodically.

 

[Paul Edmunds]

Does that "baby" have a wrist watch on?

That IS a watch, I've never noticed that before. That baby is my late aunt and the picture must 90 years old! At the time my grandfather (who took the the picture) was taking 3D photo's!

 

[stratman]

At the time my grandfather (who took the the picture) was taking 3D photo's!

Were they the 3D Stereoscopic images? Pretty cutting edge!

I wonder if your grandfather would like to have had one of the 3D printers that members like The Hat and web site owner Nifty have been posting about.

 

[Paul Edmunds]

Were they the 3D Stereoscopic images? Pretty cutting edge!

I wonder if your grandfather would like to have had one of the 3D printers that members like The Hat and web site owner Nifty have been posting about.

Beyond his wildest dreams! The camera used (which I am lucky to have) was a GLYPHOSCOPE, by JULES RICHARD of PARIS.

 

[stratman]

Looked that up and it is a neat camera. Was your grandfather's photography the impetus for your love of photography?

 

[Paul Edmunds]

Certainly, my father also worked for a London studio before concentrating on commercial art. I spent 43 years in commercial printing half of which was paralelled with my own photographic business. Graphics all my life!

 

[WilsonLaidlaw]

I bought the Canon Pixma Pro 1 in the UK. What a total heap of junk, that I wish I had never encountered. It has a built in problem on head cleaning and unless you are using it constantly, it wastes far more ink than it uses in actual printing. Nearly every time I come to use it, it has emptied one or other of the tiny but expensive ink tanks and it is not from all the printing I do on it. The printing is of reasonable quality but every supplied profile is too dark and you need to have your onscreen image very much brighter than you would think for it to print correctly. With all the ink it is wasting I am expecting any time for it to tell me the cleaning pad is full. In an inexcusable omission for a so called professional printer, replacing this pad is back to base, rather than a user job and costs over £300. The paper traction is terrible and will refuse to feed many matt papers at all and 4" x 6" paper of any variety. How Canon felt it was appropriate to sell this heap of c**p at the inflated price I paid for it, is beyond me. They should hang their heads in shame.

In France I bought a factory reconditioned Epson Stylus Pro 3880. What a superb machine. It wastes very little ink in cleaning and what is wasted goes into a user replaceable cleaning tank. I winterise it every year by putting in Jon Cone's refillable ink carts but filled with Piezoflush. These keep the heads working perfectly. It can be set up to feed anything from regular copier paper to thick card, matt, satin or gloss, it just does not matter. It just works. I will probably buy another one for the UK as I gather the replacement Surecolor P800 is not as reliable and bulletproof.

 

[stratman]

I spent 43 years in commercial printing half of which was paralelled with my own photographic business. Graphics all my life!

As the saying goes, you and @The Hat might be twin sons of different mothers! He is also a long time commercial printer, which I kid him being since the Gutenberg press.

Like the scooter in your avatar.

 

[greg allen]

I bought the Canon Pixma Pro 1 in the UK. What a total heap of junk, that I wish I had never encountered. It has a built in problem on head cleaning and unless you are using it constantly, it wastes far more ink than it uses in actual printing. Nearly every time I come to use it, it has emptied one or other of the tiny but expensive ink tanks and it is not from all the printing I do on it. The printing is of reasonable quality but every supplied profile is too dark and you need to have your onscreen image very much brighter than you would think for it to print correctly. With all the ink it is wasting I am expecting any time for it to tell me the cleaning pad is full. In an inexcusable omission for a so called professional printer, replacing this pad is back to base, rather than a user job and costs over £300. The paper traction is terrible and will refuse to feed many matt papers at all and 4" x 6" paper of any variety. How Canon felt it was appropriate to sell this heap of c**p at the inflated price I paid for it, is beyond me. They should hang their heads in shame..

I bought a Pro 10 on Ebay and had the exact same problems you did. I'd previously had a ip4700 that worked great for about five years before printing darker and darker wasting ink. I wanted to print larger format so did some research and settled on the Pro 10. Out of the box it printed so dark the images were unusable. I couldn't get a print profile to work for more than one image even if another image had the same values. Calibrating for every stinkin' image wasted a huge amount of ink even though my tests were 4"X6". With much effort I was able to put together one show of 15 images which paid for the miserable thing. After that I used it so sparingly I believe the heads clogged and I got an error code that said to take it to a Canon authorized service center or some such. The nearest one from where I live is about 110miles each way, and obviously a behemoth like that can't be shipped for much less than the price of a new one. I used it for a few months and now it's under my bed.

I know changing the head is easy but am I going to dump another $110 or whatever and get a different error code? It's such a piece of garbage even if it works again it wont work again correctly. Its been a couple of years so maybe I'll see what's out there but electronics seem to vary so much from one printer to the next of the same model. I'm even switching my photo gear from Canon to Sony as soon as the AR3 comes out as well. Canon screwed me

 

[mikling]

I bought the Canon Pixma Pro 1 in the UK. What a total heap of junk, that I wish I had never encountered. It has a built in problem on head cleaning and unless you are using it constantly, it wastes far more ink than it uses in actual printing. Nearly every time I come to use it, it has emptied one or other of the tiny but expensive ink tanks and it is not from all the printing I do on it. The printing is of reasonable quality but every supplied profile is too dark and you need to have your onscreen image very much brighter than you would think for it to print correctly. With all the ink it is wasting I am expecting any time for it to tell me the cleaning pad is full. In an inexcusable omission for a so called professional printer, replacing this pad is back to base, rather than a user job and costs over £300. The paper traction is terrible and will refuse to feed many matt papers at all and 4" x 6" paper of any variety. How Canon felt it was appropriate to sell this heap of c**p at the inflated price I paid for it, is beyond me. They should hang their heads in shame.

In France I bought a factory reconditioned Epson Stylus Pro 3880. What a superb machine. It wastes very little ink in cleaning and what is wasted goes into a user replaceable cleaning tank. I winterise it every year by putting in Jon Cone's refillable ink carts but filled with Piezoflush. These keep the heads working perfectly. It can be set up to feed anything from regular copier paper to thick card, matt, satin or gloss, it just does not matter. It just works. I will probably buy another one for the UK as I gather the replacement Surecolor P800 is not as reliable and bulletproof.

I own both the Pro-1 and 3880 and including the P800 as well. I can tell you your experience with the printers outlined is possibly with some error.
The Pro-1 is not someone's first printer and your experience with it, possibly incorporates some workflow issue.

The Pro-1 was someone's version of an M Type BMW as a printer and it can print in certain areas that the 3880 could only dream of. Unfortunately not everyone will like an M Type version of a BMW and the same goes for the Pro-1. Many of its qualities will go unappreciated by most people. My days of serious sports sedans are way past me but there was a day many many years ago that a serious sports sedan would have been perfect for me. The Pro-1 is not an economical printer to own even when refilling just like any high strung machine. If someone sold the printer indicating that its slightly larger cartridges would be more economical, then you were misled.