Looking at the new Canon PRO-300

[Ink stained Fingers]

You got your lifetime supply of Pro10s' I assume @palombian , and I'm thinking along similar lines -
the Epson L310 as a little simple printer (only) is phased out, and there is no direct successor as an Ecotank
printer, the last printer left in this range is the L805 - a 6 ink A4 printer - which I'll order soon as a backup.

 

[Artur5]

The Pro300 addresses some nagging aspects of the Pro10 as max.length limited to 26.5” and compulsory wide margins/ no custom sizes on Fine Art settings.

The last point is now bypasable by programs like Qimage.
Both questions aren’t hardware limitations of the Pro10. but Canon decided to put them in the firmware for the presumable reason of driving some potential buyers to get a Pro1000 instead. Now they lifted the restrictions on the Pro300 for the presumable reason of driving some potential buyers to upgrade from a Pro10.

Some considerations from this old and technically uneducated Canon user :

- Same 10 color inkset and size/number of nozzles-> very similar quality and ink consumption but, if the new inks are less dense ( as @mikling says ), shouldn’t we expect more ink consumption to achieve the same color density on paper?.

- Going from 20kg to 14,4kg with similar foot print is a remarkable diet. It doesn’t sounds good at all in terms of mechanical reliability.

- I’m curious to know if they improved the printing speed. My Pro10s is painfully slow.

- Of course, the key feature setting apart the new machine from the Pro10 is the chip.
To refill (Pro10) or not to refill (Pro300), this is the question

- Seems logical to expect soon the release of a new dye model to replace the Pro100

All in all, nothing revolutionary about the Pro300. They should have called it Pro10LwNr ( Lightweight non refillable ..)

 

[palombian]

You got your lifetime supply of Pro10s' I assume @palombian , and I'm thinking along similar lines -
the Epson L310 as a little simple printer (only) is phased out, and there is no direct successor as an Ecotank
printer, the last printer left in this range is the L805 - a 6 ink A4 printer - which I'll order soon as a backup.

Still need a second PRO-10(S).

OTH, when I count my annual number of refills at OEM price, I certainly would not have spent more than I do now.

Most amateur photographers don't understand you would stick with an old printer when there is a new model.
We refillers are a minority, when @jtoolman has 60 viewers Sunday evening he calls it a success.

 

[The Hat]

Fact: The Lucia Pro Matte and Photo Black are actually not as dense as the Lucia ones in the Pro-1 and Pro-10

I am sorry @mikling, but how can you accurately ascertain and then comment on the new Pro 300 or the inks when you know as little about them as the rest of us, but at least you mentioned you’re up and coming podcast, because that’s all there was new in your post.

But @Keith Cooper on the other hand has this printer and has worked with it for the past few weeks producing a huge variety of beautiful prints, then gave an excellent non bios review of his finding, now that’s what I call a proper in depth test.

When you buy a Pro 300 and then do your own review, I will look forward to your findings with interest, regarding refilling, inks and a resetter, that would be more beneficial to us here on Nifty, then all this speculation…
P.S. On this side of the pond the prices are much the same as the Previous Pro model printers..

 

[mikling]

Well the Pro300 inks are I am 99.9% sure the same inks as the Pro-1000, 2000, etc. The Lucia Pro inkset. Canon will not make a new inkset for such a low volume printer. This has been their practice for nearly two decades. Now the other thing is that I said the Lucia Pro and did not state Pro300. So there is some legal delineation there. Canon made the same claims for the Pro-1000 about the darker black and it is easy to say it does this due to the new Black inks. AND yes, they were new in the Pro-1000 end. How can they explain that their high gamut RED, YELLOW and BLUE inks could be a major constituent of obtaining that result to the layperson. Hey it is logical for the layperson to understand darker black via darker ink, right? What you'll also notice about darker black is that it varies by paper, because of the tight ICC tuning. Most reviewers won't understand the real technical reasons either. Same reason why Epson claims their clogging in printhheads are physical clogs but the cognoscenti know otherwise. Keith did not test the ink himself either, he simply restated what he was told by Canon. I thought you'd understand that. But it appears not. Reviewers typically just recite what the mfrs claims....like mainstream news today. Reporters are hardly digging into an issue but simply regurgitate what is given to them,

BTW, the printhead carryover from the Pro-10........well that happened between the i9900 and the Pro9000 and Pro9000 MkII. Three models. I highly suspect it is carried over here again.

I don't expect people like Keith to dig in and find the reality because that is not his thing on a daily basis. Whereas it is my thing. I will test the ink color exclusively side by side to a level even $100,000 equipment cannot match including print linearity output by the printhead.

This Pro300 is now an interesting marketing issue for Canon. In Europe it could mean a replacement for the Pro-10S. In North America, the marketing strategy has been in a different direction. Canon essentially gave printers away so that they could sell ink and make it up there. At the suggested pricing, that strategy will surely put a dent in the ink sales down the road. If a Pro-100 was MSRP at 699 and sold out the door for 499, Care to guess how that effect shrinks the market, especially with a devastated economy due to COVID. One can undersrtand the brand extension of ImagePrograf downwards for an entry level point for more customers. But now there is a huge gap in what people were paying and what the new price point is.

 

[mikling]

The Pro300 addresses some nagging aspects of the Pro10 as max.length limited to 26.5” and compulsory wide margins/ no custom sizes on Fine Art settings.

The last point is now bypasable by programs like Qimage.
Both questions aren’t hardware limitations of the Pro10. but Canon decided to put them in the firmware for the presumable reason of driving some potential buyers to get a Pro1000 instead. Now they lifted the restrictions on the Pro300 for the presumable reason of driving some potential buyers to upgrade from a Pro10.

Some considerations from this old and technically uneducated Canon user :

- Same 10 color inkset and size/number of nozzles-> very similar quality and ink consumption but, if the new inks are less dense ( as @mikling says ), shouldn’t we expect more ink consumption to achieve the same color density on paper?.

- Going from 20kg to 14,4kg with similar foot print is a remarkable diet. It doesn’t sounds good at all in terms of mechanical reliability.

- I’m curious to know if they improved the printing speed. My Pro10s is painfully slow.

- Of course, the key feature setting apart the new machine from the Pro10 is the chip.
To refill (Pro10) or not to refill (Pro300), this is the question

- Seems logical to expect soon the release of a new dye model to replace the Pro100

All in all, nothing revolutionary about the Pro300. They should have called it Pro10LwNr ( Lightweight non refillable ..)

I thought about that. We know that the Pro-10 has been an extremely reliable printer and more so that the standby 9500.
Given that extreme level of reliability it is potentially possible to reduce its maintenance cycles so less ink is wasted. Personally I think the clean routines are over the top but I appreciate Canon trying to protect its printhead. Canon OEM Lucia ink and Lucia Pro ink does not dissolve easily. That means if a clog or drying of the ink develops beyond a certain point, it is game over for the normal user....replacement printhead time. Canon engineers know this and they probably made sure that situations is extremely unlikely to occur. So they possibly modified the clean/prime cycle.
The other way to to this is via the print engine.

And this relates to what some of us discovered when acquiring used Pro-10 tanks. If they had dried out thri outlet pads, they become highly compromised and nearly impossible to refurbish properly. This leads to feed problems.

One reason why the Pro-100 and Pro-10 were as Palombian mentioned, major upgrades to their predecessors in the print output was because Canon FINALLY made a leapfrog in their nozzle control that is how much discrete control they had gained over their predecessors. What we don't know is whether they went all in and used all the potential and i suspect not. Epson had also done this in the 3880/P800 transition. The P800 and P600 used more of the darker channels than their predecessors to produce the same image. Using more dark ink than the Photo colors will naturally lead to less ink consumption but usually the cost to this is grain in the image. If there is surplus nozzle control capacity, they can do this and not get too much more grain. We are not privy to the engineering details and it would be difficult to easily spot.

I will also comment on the tightly tuned paper/ink/printer ICCs on the Pro-100 model as well. The high variation of the colors used by different papers and print quality is very surprising. Printing with Luster and then switching to Glossy can require vastly different amts of different colors when using the same image, Again, a ton of tuning by Canon engineers to optimize the print output....that went unappreciated for years.

This is something that we don't know. For example, the R3000, P600, Pro3880 and P800 used identical inks colors. However, their respective IQ are all different, with the older and lower in the totem pole being the least capable. It suggests that print engines are all predesigned and then released one iteration at a time to make space for "new" models.

 

[mikling]

Still need a second PRO-10(S).

OTH, when I count my annual number of refills at OEM price, I certainly would not have spent more than I do now.

Most amateur photographers don't understand you would stick with an old printer when there is a new model.
We refillers are a minority, when @jtoolman has 60 viewers Sunday evening he calls it a success.

Toolman's channel apparently now sits amongst one of the top ten channels on photography and printing. Many people tune in to podcasts after it is done when they have time. So perhaps many more tune but when they are able to fast forward etc.

 

[palombian]

... BTW, the printhead carryover from the Pro-10........well that happened between the i9900 and the Pro9000 and Pro9000 MkII. Three models. I highly suspect it is carried over here again...

Keith reviewed the printer as a photographer, but he masters the innards as well.
We could ask him to have a look ...
The type number is engraved somewhere on the printhead.

Although the PRO-9500 Mark II had a new type number but this could be used in the Mark I.
Since this is a new model chances Canon will be so nice are much lower.

 

[palombian]

... Well the Pro300 inks are I am 99.9% sure the same inks as the Pro-1000, 2000, etc. The Lucia Pro inkset. Canon will not make a new inkset for such a low volume printer ...

Why Canon made a new inkset for the PRO-1/PRO-10 then ?
It is not uncommon - also for cameras - that they test new features on a consumer model first.

 

[Artur5]

Keith reviewed the printer as a photographer, but he masters the innards as well.
We could ask him to have a look ...
The type number is engraved somewhere on the printhead.
Although the PRO-9500 Mark II had a new type number but this could be used in the Mark I.
Since this is a new model chances Canon will be so nice are much lower.

I tend to agree. Using the same printhead on the Pro300 means that the QY6-0085 ( or a new model number backwards compatible ) will be available as long as the Pro300 remains in production. From a point of view of Pro10 users this sounds too good to be true. Canon wants people migrating to the new model (which is probably refill proof ). If they use a totally new printhead for the Pro300, in the future many owners of Pro10s with broken printheads will "upgrade" more or less reluctantly, but most of them wouldn't if new QY6-0085 units were still available.