Recently I got up close and personal with Canon’s new Pixma Pro-1 printer, at the Canon Pro Solutions Show 2011. Now that I have discussed the Canon EOS 1D X HDSLR, Canon EOS C300 & Red Scarlet X digital cinema cameras, Canon EOS 5D Mark III, et al, it’s time to take a look at this new printer.
The Canon Pixma Pro-1 printer is extremely impressive. It is the world’s first A3+ printer to feature 12 separate inks (five of which are monochrome) giving it both a wide colour gamut and the ability to produce black and white prints with smooth tonal gradations, without the need to change ink tanks. This combined with support for input resolutions of up to 1200ppi, at bit depths of up to 16 per channel, output resolutions of up to 4800x2400dpi, built in ICC profiles for a wide range of specialist papers and out of the box support for Photoshop and Lightroom (including direct printing from the latter) enables it to offer archival results that Canon claim are good for 200 years.
The Pixma Pro-1 does not replace Canon’s current top of the range PIXMA Pro9500 Mark II, instead taking its crown as the new king of the line-up. By utilising higher capacity ink tanks than the PIXMA Pro9500 Mark II, that sit at the front of the printer, instead of on top of its print head, the Pixma Pro-1 is able to deliver greater economies of scale and a much faster print time of approximately 2 minutes 55 sec (for ‘gallery-quality’ A3+ prints) than the PIXMA Pro9500 Mark II.
At the Pro Solutions Show, Canon allowed me to test the Pixma Pro-1, by printing some of my own pictures. I used images shots with a Canon 5D Mark I, Nikon D3s, Nikon D700 and Sony Alpha (saved as 16 bit TIFFs) on a mixture of media including gloss and matte art paper. Frankly I was blown away by both the quality and the relative speed of the output. Images were extremely sharp and black really was black.
Although I would like to do more extensive testing before reaching a final conclusion, from what I have seen so far, I get the impression that when it comes to A3+ printing, the Pixma Pro-1 could be an Epson killer. Certainly it is a printer I would be happy to have sitting on my desk…even if it means buying a bigger desk. Lastly add more life to your photos by using colorful photo frames made with these custom prints. One of the pictures I printed on the Pixma Pro-1 had previously been printed on a Lightjet (from an 8 bit file) for exhibition purposes. With the exception that the (non calibrated) Pixma Pro-1 print was slightly darker than the lightjet print, the two were virtually indistinguishable.
© 2011 – 2019, Paul D. All rights reserved.
