tashley
Subscriber Member
I really liked my 24" Z3100 but it has always had an alarming call-out to print-out ratio and has now just died for what looks like the final time, with the 'formatter' giving up the ghost (it's a secondary motherboard I hear) and threatening to to cost over six hundred pounds to replace. Otherwise I've had marks all over baryta prints that the engineers couldn't fully dispel, problems with the printhead drop detectors that recur due to the use of 'dusty' papers like Hanny/HP Textured fine art, blah blah blah.
And yet there's a lot to like: it cleans itself nicely every day so there's no clogging, I can print to it over Airport network using ethernet and best of all it profiles its own papers and manages the list of ICC profiles back from itself onto my computer pretty seamlessly.
I'm not going to get an Epson, for all the usual reasons, but I do have my eye on the Canon 6300 which according to Lula has better inks and gamuts but then I will be thrown onto the mercy of individual paper makers and their ICC provisions.
I print small volumes of fine art prints (by small volumes I mean on average four or five 24 x 36" prints a week) and so need something that is good at sitting idle. I don't have perfect colour vision so I profile everything in my workflow. And I want to be able to print from Lightroom without using a RIP.
Cost is A but but not THE consideration: the Z3200 replacement uses the same inks ( I have several in stock) and earns a trade-in. It would therefore cost me a net £2,210 to go for a Z3200 and £2,672 to go for the Canon, excluding the value of retained inks. The rebate on the Z3100 is £315 and I might conceivably top that a little by offering it as trade-in on Ebay...
So the real question is, has anyone any experience to show that the Canon is more reliable? Assuming most paper makers provide ICC profiles, will my results be in the same ballpark of colour accuracy on the Canon as with the Z3200...
Tough decision! All and any experience and advice would be deeply appreciated!
Thanks
Tim
ps this is a replication of a thread I started at DPReview just now too, sorry, but I need to spread the advice net as wide as possible!
And yet there's a lot to like: it cleans itself nicely every day so there's no clogging, I can print to it over Airport network using ethernet and best of all it profiles its own papers and manages the list of ICC profiles back from itself onto my computer pretty seamlessly.
I'm not going to get an Epson, for all the usual reasons, but I do have my eye on the Canon 6300 which according to Lula has better inks and gamuts but then I will be thrown onto the mercy of individual paper makers and their ICC provisions.
I print small volumes of fine art prints (by small volumes I mean on average four or five 24 x 36" prints a week) and so need something that is good at sitting idle. I don't have perfect colour vision so I profile everything in my workflow. And I want to be able to print from Lightroom without using a RIP.
Cost is A but but not THE consideration: the Z3200 replacement uses the same inks ( I have several in stock) and earns a trade-in. It would therefore cost me a net £2,210 to go for a Z3200 and £2,672 to go for the Canon, excluding the value of retained inks. The rebate on the Z3100 is £315 and I might conceivably top that a little by offering it as trade-in on Ebay...
So the real question is, has anyone any experience to show that the Canon is more reliable? Assuming most paper makers provide ICC profiles, will my results be in the same ballpark of colour accuracy on the Canon as with the Z3200...
Tough decision! All and any experience and advice would be deeply appreciated!
Thanks
Tim
ps this is a replication of a thread I started at DPReview just now too, sorry, but I need to spread the advice net as wide as possible!