Dan,
Congrats to the new printer. I have the ipf6300 since three years. I love the results and the handling of the printer. All very intuitive and easy. I never went through the trouble of making my own profiles, as I found that the profiles from the major paper manufacturers generally produced great results. I only had a problem with skin tones on some Hahnemühle papers (although since I moved to a new computer, these went away—don’t ask me why, there is no logical connection but it happened).
BUT, and this is a VERY BIG BUT, the Canon printers are fragile and need to be taken good care of. They do have some serious software / firmware problems, that can turn out to be particularly costly if you do not run the printer regularly.
I am not a regular printer, and I choose the Canon because I read that they are less prone to clogging than the Epson printers. While this is generally true, they do run more cleaning cycles when not used regularly. At one point, you get a message “Hardware failure—please shut down the printer and restart” or an error code 03130031.2618. Eventually, what can happen is that the power unit and / or the mother board can fry because they get too much current during the cleaning cycles. This is now a well know and well reported firmware problem discussed extensively, for example, on two LuLa threads.
Canon IPF8300 and 6300 Reliability Issues (2F44 + other issues)
Canon iPF 6300 Hardware Error
My printer gave me this error code a few weeks ago. I had not used it for a couple of months, then printer a few shots. The got this code and the printer not does not work at all.
What frustrated me most was that, when speaking to the technician at the dealer where I had bought the printer (this dealer sells almost exclusively to professionals), I was told that this not only happens to folks who, like me, do not print very often, but also to professional users, and that Canon is fully aware of the problem but does not undertake anything to solve it. The technician said that he was very angry because they have many frustrated customers who have problems with these printers.
I am not writing this to bash Canon. I think their printers are great when and if they work. But I am really frustrated myself, partly because I don’t know what to do. I have a good profession printer a couple of block away and the most rational solution would be to buy a A3 printer for home and give all the other jobs away. But I like printing myself—it is so much fun if a nice print slowly emerges from the printer. But I also dread the idea that I have to now to invest another 1500-1800 Euros (2 print heads; 1 mother board) to make this thing work.
I know that in the U.S.. these printers are cheap but here they are very expensive (the new 6400 is 3,000 EUR + 21% VAT in Belgium), and for that money you would expect them to work longer than 3 years. As my dealer said: Any car manufacturer who sells new cars for 30,000 EUR which you then have to repair for 18,000 EUR after 3 years would be out of business soon, but Canon seems to believe they can get away with that.
One piece of advice that I read: There is a software that automatically makes a test print a pre-defined intervals. Someone said that when he does not print for more than a day, he connects his printer to a very basic second hand PC on which the software is installed. The PC then automatically makes a small test print every day or third day. Definitely a cheaper option than a failed mother board and new print heads.
Anyway, good luck and have fun with the new printer—and sorry for the long rant.