Canon iPF5000 large format printer review
Canon iPF5000 large format printer
This A2+ printer from Canon is big, In fact, it's huge. Will its output make a big impression on us though?
Words & pictures Ian Farrell
When the nice man from Canon turned up at Pro HQ to deliver and set up their new large format printer, the imagePROGRAF iPF5000, I have to confess that I thought a terrible mistake had been made. We were expecting an A2+ printer and, having had our hands on the Epson Stylus Pro 3800 only a month earlier, the coffin-sized box that was being dragged across the car park looked way too big.
But no - the iPF5000 it was. As the man from Canon confirmed ("it's a beast!"), this is not so much a desktop printer, but more of a unit that demands a table all to itself. The unit is almost a metre long, and its size is increased further by adding a roll paper holder to the rear.
Installation is a fairly straightforward affair, with connection to a PC or Mac taking place via either a USB or Ethernet cable. Software installation was also a breeze, with a Photoshop plug-in being added to our iMac test machine in addition to the main drivers and print profiles.
We tested two types of Canon media: glossy coated paper and matte photo paper. Each was supplied as a 30m long roll, 17-inches wide. This is a very economical way to work as any paper sizes shorter than the length of an A2 sheet are automatically trimmed by the built-in guillotine. Longer print sizes are possible too.
Installing a roll of paper is straightforward: depending on its manufacturer and type, two spacers are used (or not) to secure it to the supplied metal bar. Once this is done, the whole thing is dropped into the printer and the paper fed into the mechanism. Once the type of paper has been selected in the printer's menu system, the iPF5000 goes to work loading it, and making sure everything is straight. On our first attempt it declared that "the paper is skew" and spat it back out onto the roll. A little disturbing, but it's reassuring that iPF5000 is on the lookout for potentially wonky prints. A nice touch is the way the printer handles changing media mid-way through a roll: press the eject button and the length of remaining paper is printed on the beginning of the roll, along with a bar code that the printer will read next time the paper is fed in, meaning you won't have to set the paper type again. Clever! The iPF5000 can also take cut-sheet paper, of course.
Once loaded and ready to go, our first results from the Canon were a little disappointing. The matte media we were supplied with couldn't be found in the installed paper descriptions in the driver software. Selecting an alternative matte paper type seemed like the logical thing to do, but we couldn't find a close match and prints on this media lacked a lot of the punch we were expecting. Undaunted, we switched over to the glossy media, and were much happier. Colours sing out loud and there is no trace of bronzing or banding. Top-notch stuff. If we'd have had more time to search around on the Internet for updated drivers this may have fixed the lacklustre performance on the matte media.
