Couldn't help wondering whether anyone around here ("virtually" speaking) has one of these beasts. I just got one last week, and it's still sitting in a box on the floor waiting for me to clean up enough space to put it on a table. (By the way, a lot of Canon's papers are half-priced for "black friday".)

So, my reason for starting the thread is to find out what adventures I can expect from this printer, and how to deal with 'em. Tips, trouble areas, techniques, and things. Even things that don't start with "T". Or about wide-format printing, generally.

So, what's your experience been like? (You can see at this point that I don't know enough to ask an intelligent question.)

[Lev]

why you opened this thread now I'm back thinking whether or not to get this printer.... total headache! It's an amazing machine but on the other hand, needs a lot of maintenance.

[DonV]

Wow!
I'd like a "bigger" printer, but at over $500 for a set of ink cartridges for the Canon 1000- no way I could(or would) justify it.

I'll just have to stick to 8x10 or pay someone else to make the few larger prints I "need" or want.

[Michail_P]

I’m on the same page with DonV... great machine, but the maintenance cost is off my wallet. Have had great feedback about it. In my mind, such prints are better left in the right hands. I know color calibration for each photo is a separate chapter.

[JohnMc]

I'd suggest limiting yourself to maybe three papers for a while - shiny, not shiny, and what you think will be your choice for 'fine' art/photo paper, and mastering those. There's a whole world of new things you'll need to check off/learn to get through to the other end - profiles, (screen)proofing, print quality, calibration, feed path(s), paper curl, dry down and humidity, ... You should have a good viewing station set up where you can control/vary lighting.


If I recall, DPP has a ring-around feature included which can be handy, and you should make a template(s) for doing your own test-strip prints and I'd suggest having them with text boxes so you can note significant settings on the print itself and start seeing the results of minor changes from screen to paper(s) using your editing software. You should make yourself a standard test image(s) which is helpful for baseline comparisons of papers. You can d/l any number of 'studio' scenes or color charts some of which are/can be handy say for gamut comparisons, but for you the prcess starts with your camera, not someone else's. Take notes and have fun.

[Adam]

I've had one of these for a while and use it occasionally. Several years ago these things were essentially free after mail-in rebate, so it's been an incredible value. The print quality is great but the ink doesn't last very long, so be sure to keep a spare set of cartridges around (third party ones work fine).

My unit is pretty "picky" in the sense that it requires around 10 minutes to get ready after being unplugged for a while. It also almost always displays a nonsensical message that it is broken and needs repairs- not sure if it's a driver issue or something else, but after I dismiss the error and try printing again, everything works fine until the next time it is unplugged. So, if you have the space I'd recommend keeping it plugged in. Good luck!

[biz-engineer]

Normally, the print quality from Canon Pro series is excellent. Downside is the size/weight of the printer (especially the Pro 2000 and up), and cost of maintenance ink, they like to be used regularly.

[officiousbystander]

What would be interesting would be the identification of the threshold at which acquiring such a printer becomes more cost effective than outsourcing.

[West Penn]

Here's a link to an article on the Red River photo paper website about the cost of printing with the Pro-1000. They also have a number of similar articles on the cost of printing with other printers. See: Cost of Printing Canon PRO-1000

[Lev]

Printing cost is not that big, but problem is that you can not leave this printer without job, it needs to print daily! otherwise a cleaning cycles will destroy ink instantly.

So, I finally made enough space for the thing and hoisted it up on to the table. I figured if I can lift a 70 lb. dog, I can lift a 70 lb. printer. Difference is that the printer is a big unwieldy boxey thing, while the dog conforms to my arms. Nevertheless, I got it up there and ran through the initial setup, which concludes with a test of the printhead alignment. That showed white horizontal lines going through some of the patterns, which I take to be nozzle drop-outs. Could there be any other explanation? And what do I do to fix that on a machine with a brand-new printhead and ink and such?

[JohnMc]

W/o seeing the results... did you run the routine a second time? did you get a good nozzle check? did attempt a manual alignment?

W/o seeing the results... did you run the routine a second time? did you get a good nozzle check? did attempt a manual alignment?

After that initial 1-page run-through that the machine does sort of automatically at installation, I ran the more exhaustive 3-page routine under the "maintenance" menu option, and that worked beautifully. Then I ran the automagical color-calibration routine and my wife said that worked beautifully, too (I'm color-blind). Then, without having calibrated my monitor or making sure I've got the ICC profile stuff set correctly, I proceeded to waste half a dozen sheets of 7x22 Canon photo paper printing off some "test images" of some favorites of mine. With one exception, each was fantastic. Everyone I showed them to said they were phenomenal. One thing I didn't expect, really, despite what all the InterNet/Youtube printer nerds said, was that people really do go "OOOH!" and "WOW!" over pictures they've already seen on a monitor (usually a "smartphone" monitor) when they get a beautifully printed huge picture shoved in front of them.

[JohnMc]

Good to hear. Sounds like you need to do some B&W. Have you ordered more ink and paper yet? ;

Good to hear. Sounds like you need to do some B&W. Have you ordered more ink and paper yet? ;

Oh, boy, that made me chuckle! I'd bought four boxes of A2 paper already, 25 sheets per box, so I'm probably ok for this week, anyway. I looked at the "machine status" thing on the computer and it says more than half the ink's gone already, though I understand about 20% of what was there initially went to feed various pipes and tubes inside the machine, priming the pump, as it were.

Funny you should mention B&W photography. I used to do a lot of that back when film and developer were pretty inexpensive. But, being color blind also means being what I call, "resolution enhanced". I've got more luminosity "pixels" per square inch of retina than people with good color vision, because the receptors for color are relatively huge and take up a lot of real estate on the sensor. Since I don't have so many of those, I've got gazillions more of the relatively tiny luminosity receptors. It's like I'm seeing in QHD 4K in (almost) HDR B&W while other people are seeing in VGA in 32 bit full color with a limited dynamic range (wolf vision - that's my superpower). (I have to qualify that a little - I have red/green color blindness, normal in the blue/yellow range.) Anyway, I can't stand digital cameras' "black and white" because it's not truly black and white, it's grayscale, which looks entirely different to me, and I figure if you're going to do that kind of gradient-based picture, you may as well have color.

All that aside, I woke up this morning wanting to print stuff. I reckon I got Christmas early this year. But what that made me think is that all this time with the digital photography thing, my post processing has been about a slap-dash quick-and-dirty approach, cropping like crazy, in order to get something that would look ok on a computer monitor. Now, I've got motivation to go back through all that crap I've been saving since I got my first Sony digital camera sometime in the previous century, (first trashing the stuff I shouldn't have saved anyway) and edit anything good that I can find for use with the printer. I find I'm not interested in going out to take pictures of the beautiful crescent moon (it's about three in the morning now), instead I want to go look at all those old pictures and whip them into shape for printing. I reckon I'm going to have to actually learn all that stuff about how to work all the bells and whistles built into the editing software. I'm like a kid with a new bicycle.

Oh, and as to the one picture that didn't turn out right - I'd picked "relative colormetric" rather than "perceptual" in the printer driver options. Probably won't touch that setting again.