Shutterbug: Canon’s imagePROGRAF iPF5000 17” PrinterCanon’s imagePROGRAF iPF5000 17” Printer; A New Wide Format Pigment Ink PrinterAbout a year ago Canon announced new pigment ink professional wide format printers for the US market. Initially, the smallest of these Canon printers available in Japan, the 17 wide, was not slated for the US market. Not long after, Canon announced the PIXMA Pro9500 printer, a new 13 pigment ink printer. I responded immediately to this announcement, requesting a unit for test and evaluation as soon as available. Months went by and I again contacted Canon about the PIXMA Pro9500 and found out its release had been moved back to 2007. Canon suggested I might like to test and review the imagePROGRAF iPF5000 17 wide format inkjet instead, which used the same inks and similar technology. My curiosity got the best of me, and I wanted to see how Canon has dealt with pigment ink printing. The iPF5000, along with its larger brethren, utilizes Canon Lucia pigment inks. These are ground fine and encapsulated with a polymer compound, an approach that is said to enhance durability and image quality. The Canon Lucia inkset is comprised of 12 distinct colors, with two densities of cyan and magenta, black and matte black plus two levels of gray, in addition to yellow, red, green, and blue. This number of different inks reduces the amount of color mixing needed to achieve many specific colors, and is said to produce cleaner, purer reproduced print image values. And, with both black and matte black loaded in the printer, switching is achieved for printing on fiber- or resin-coated media automatically when each particular media type is selected in the printer driver. In addition, monochrome black and white prints can be made with black, gray, and photo gray and just a minimum of color inks applied.
