2020-01-05

New printer (Canon PRO-1000)

I have had, and used, many printers over time (for paper, not 3D).

Just off the top of my head :-

  • Simple line of pins impact dot matrix through ribbon - classic. I had a few of these.
  • Single "pin" with rotating roller behind paper to do dot matrix through ribbon - slow - prints one dot at a time moving up through the character, then the blade shaped head moves right to do next pixel one dot at a time.
  • Band printers - I did not own one, but used one - has all the letters on a band, and it is fascinating watching the line form as each letter is printed when it is over the right space, printing many in the line at a time, so the line of text sort of forms in seemingly random order in front of your eyes.
  • Daisy wheel, impact print through ribbon, but fun doing some graphics with a lot of full stops.
  • A spark based printer, single wire high drags at high speed across the paper for each row burning off a silvered surface of the paper, dot matrix - creates a black on silver text.
  • A spark jet printer, with a carbon rod in a glass tube making a spark to the paper and carrying carbon deposited on the page. Single glass tube moves at high speed back and forth over the paper. Like printing with pencil. I did my degree dissertation on that.
  • A variety of thermal printers on thermal paper - head the width of paper. Fades rather easily.
  • A variety of thermal transfer printers, transfer from film to normal paper, head the width of paper.
  • A variety of thermal transfer multi-colour ribbon printers for photo printing.
  • The plastic card printer we use at work, thermal transfer. Ive used two kinds of such printers.
  • Normal A4 laser printers, postscript
  • A3 laser printer, colour
  • Ink jet printer
  • Bubble jet printer
  • Oh, and pen plotters
Wow, I have had a lot of printers. I suspect I have missed some out even.

Actually, I left out that I have used manual, movable lead type printing machines and done typesetting using actual fonts of lead type characters. Genuine upper and lower "cases". That was a long time ago. I must be old.

The printer I have used for a long time is a wax based printer - originally Tektronix, but now bought by Xerox. I like them as they are not as messy as using toner and do solid colours really well. You just drop in these wax blocks to load the ink, neat and tidy. They are OK (ish) for photo print, but for colour letterheads (which is why we got them originally) they are really nice. I even print red wax seals to use with an embossing seal, and well, it was actually wax.

The office moved on to other laser printers some time ago, and my printer here finally started playing up (sheet feeder issues), so I have decided it is time for a new printer, and I thought it would be nice to get an ink jet type printer, but why not get one that can do photos...

What I eventually got was a Canon PRO-1000. It can have a stack of A4 plain paper for the normal use cases, but can also take a variety of sizes up to A2, and do impressive high resolution professional quality photo prints, edge to edge, on photo paper. It does pretty good photos even on plain paper.

So, yes, it will be used for simple A4 prints most of the time. These days I print quite low volumes, and can alway use printers at work for printing something with a lot of pages. It also has separately replaceable ink cartridges, which I prefer. However, there have been occasions where we do want to print bigger than A4, mainly for circuit drawings, etc.

But yes, I can print really nice photographs now. This is printing an A2 map on plain paper.


I did consider getting the wider models, they can do roll based prints up to A0, or even bigger. You can print proper posters for adverts and the like. But no way it would fit in the man-cave sensibly. I was also not sure if it would do the simple A4 plain paper as easily. The PRO-1000 seems a good compromise. The print quality really is rather impressive and having the option of large prints is nice.

7 comments:

  1. I'd totally forgotten about my old Olivetti JP101 until this reminded me of it!

    ReplyDelete
  2. The 'PageWide' inkjet printers are pretty cool from a technology point of view. They do ~50 pages/min from an inkjet with decent photo quality, but they waste *so much* ink in their cleaning cycle if you don't print much.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Which was the reason I stopped using ink-jets. Cost a fortune to clean the heads just to print one or two photos without bands from a blocked nozzle. Now I order photo prints on-line (up to whatever size I want) and have a cheap (and, more importantly, cheaply refillable) colour laser at home for the rest of the stuff. Works out much cheaper and much less hassle.

      Delete
  3. Just scrapped my Xerox ColorQube wax ink printer over Christmas. Constant power supply problems - PSU already replaced under warranty and still problems. A real battle to get it to work again after every single power cut. Paper tray feeder playing up. £400 and from 2012. Nice print quality, but very very slow - if you can get it working reliably.

    I notice that Xerox have now ended their wax product line. I guess the downsides just outweigh the upsides. Can't write on the printed ink. Can't laminate a printed page. Photocopying a printed page sometimes reflects back at the photocopier head too much. The ink can chip off the page, especially if the page is folded in half. Fiddly/finnicky about shutdown times/methods due to ink temperatures and cool-down times. And so on.

    But definitely nice print quality.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I wish the Alps printers were still a thing, mostly because of printing in white. It's nearly impossible to find a printer that will print white on transparency without spending an absolute fortune these days!

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  5. Ah... I see you've upgraded your 3D printer to a TAZ-Pro.

    Did you find any real benefit over and above the TAZ-6?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It is nicer with the Z axis lift being easy when moving from one part to another, etc. The dual extrusion has hardly been used as I have yet to do a good print with dissolvable material. So may not be worth the extra. Nice though.

      Delete

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