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Another big fish enters an increasingly crowded pond.
Those who are following along with the happenings in the professional printer space are well a ware that 2006 was a busy year. For the first time in photographic history, Epson, the long-standing king of professional desktop output, was directly challenged by HP and Canon, two musclemen of the imaging world that have been nearly utterly absent from pro printing until now.
We've already reviewed HP's challenge to Epson's dominance (Product Review, February 2007), and now we turn to Canon's big contender to the printing crown: the Prograf iPF5000. I use the work "big" literally, as this 17 ? 22 printer is a very large device, physically wider and deeper than the Epson 4800 (considered the benchmark for photographic output), weighing in above 90 pounds and arriving complete with its own wooden forklift skid. (We burned ours as firewood; think of it as a value-added piece of packaging material.)
Luckily the weight is worth it. The output from the 12-color iPF5000 is easily some of the best in its field, and only a few tics prevent it from winning a race for the class president. This 12-color pigment ink printer is fantastic; the addition of red, green and blue inks to the now-standard eight-color (nine when you count matte black) set makes for a more realistic image, no matter how you slice it.
UNBOXING DAY
The large, imposing shipping crate contains a well packed and easy-to-set-up printer. We were able to assemble the parts for the iPF5000 without a single glance at the setup guide. Even the rear paper assembly attached with no problems at all.
The dozen ink cartridges take some time to set up and produce a heck of a lot of garbage during the unwrapping, but the carts insert easily and the whole process couldn't be smoother. After turning on the printer for the first time the ink lines are charged with the starter carts, which contain less ink than the i3oml standard cartridges. (Caveat emptor.)
Current retail prices result in a cost of about $1,000 per complete set of inks, though in the real world, certain ink colors will of course be used more rapidly than others. We found that the printer...