My first quasi photo quality inkjet printer was an A4 Canon Bubble Jet. The printouts were OK but sometimes it printed out something like vertical banding of a ultra high ISO digital photo for some unknown reasons. I suspect it could be clogged print nozzles but I can’t remember if it had any utilities to clean the print heads. Another major problem with that printer was its evaporating ink. That’s right, I vividly remember the last time I had put in an entire set of brand new ink cartridges, I had printed only one A4 photo and left it for a month before I tried to print another photo only to find that all 4 ink cartridges were completely empty! Since then I have not purchased another Canon printer until now.
All these years my family and I had shared several HP printers. They had been very reliable. Although the HP6110 all-in-one had died a few months back after several years of heavy usage and the HP7220 no longer support nor being supported by Mac OS 10.5, the rest of them, especailly my very first HP, the 970Cxi, is still running!
While I thought all these home use printers had to be constantly adjusted to get just so-so color quality photos, under the recommendation of a good friend, I began to look into the Canon Pixma Pro series A3+ size printers. Originally I was only looking at the Pro9000, a dye base printer for I wasn’t sure if the extra cost warrants the pigment base Pro9500. Further research suggested that the Pro9500 has a much higher quality (gallery quality) B&W printing function with the extra mid gray ink.
The Pro9500 currently retails at around HKD$4900 and around HKD$110/color for each of the 10 color ink cartridge system. When I placed an order with a trustful Canon camera authorized dealer who can also get me the Pro9500, the shop owner found out that all of the remaining stocks had gone to various shops in preparation of making room for the new mk.II version of the Pro9500 as well as the Pro9000. A check though the web indeed reveals the mk.II has just been announced and should be in stores some time in May. That’s no good for me since 1/ although the mk.I and the mk.II has the same MSRP, the mk.II is sure going to be much more closely sticking to the full MSRP than the mk.I is today which is about HKD$1000 less than full MSRP. And 2/, I am planning on participating an exhibition in May which is being hosted by a friend’s art club. While the introduction of the mk.II itself isn’t too big a deal since it looks like the only difference between the mk.I and the mk.II is only 50% printing speed difference with the new one being faster and nothing else, the timing is so very poor. There seems to be no solution but to place an order for the new mk.II while hoping it would arrive in time, and at the same time scout for either a new or used mk.I.
Just a few days ago, while I was scouting for a used Nikon MB-D10 battery grip for the D700, I saw a Pro9500 mk.I for sale ad being re-posted at a reduced price of HKD$2000 from HKD$2500. I thought if it were in very good condition, it would save me a lot over a new one and help out the costs of consumables. I went through the usual contacting and meeting with the owner and took on the deal.
While it took me all of the entire one night to test out the printer with some used ink cartridge to almost having to replace every single cartridges and still having major color shifts to a point where I had almost given up on any possibility of having quality printouts at home with any affordable printers all while it was almost 3:30am in the morning already, I thought to myself, this can’t be true. There must be something I had overlooked since the reviews of the Pro9500 had been nothing but highly praised.
I then ran a print head calibration print only to find out there is an error with the printer which asked me to try cleaning the print head! Dah~~~ of course! The only possible explanation to why I had been getting nothing but heavily Magenta shifted prints no matter how much green and yellow I had dialed into the settings is that the green and or yellow print head must have been clogged!
After a quick print head cleaning and head test prints and head calibration, off to a photo print and voila!, a 90% match to the iMac screen! Being so excited I was eager to fine tune the color settings, after about 8 more 3″ prints and 45 minutes or so, I was able to get it to print to a 95% match! It was already 4:30am by then so it was last night when I when ahead and tested a few more full A4 printings that I was able to further fine tune it another 1-2%! Which can be taken as a full 100% match since there is no way a printed photo on a reflective surface of a printing paper can match the luminosity of a computer monitor with translucent light. And all that was done with $50/20sheet aftermarket semigloss inkjet photo paper only!
The next thing to do is to a pack of A4 Canon paper for more testing and also some Canon A3+ paper for a few gallery worthy prints! Yippykaiyeh!
WhaUSay?!