Profile and paper for Canon Pro 9000 mkii

[Grandad35]

Big difference in price from Qimage to Genuine Fractals, is the latter 3x better or is it because it's aimed at the professional market rather than than the general photographer.

I did figure out late last night that the panoramic limitations were down to Canons own driver limitations, and it appears that there is no way of improving on that. Do not quite understand that when Canons own cameras can do large panoramics, but hey ho!

I've never used Genuine Fractals myself, but have read good reviews and the demo images are impressive. If I often needed to make large prints from low resolution images and wanted the best possible results, I'd give it a try. However, I almost never need to do this as my biggest prints are 24x36 (done outside) and my cameras have lots of pixels, so I am more than satisfied with the capabilities of Qimage.

I suspect that Canon doesn't allow panoramas because this would require that the paper feed mechanism keeps the paper perfectly straight so that you don't see a curve in the print. How do you do this without a roll feeder? I can just imagine the customer complaints from people trying to print on taped together sheets of paper piled randomly behind the printer. How many printer sales do they lose because they don't print panos? Probably not a lot. How much money do they save by not having to troubleshoot "problems" when printing panos without a roll feeder? Probably way more than the lost printer sales.

I have read speculation that they added this limitation to prevent overheating the print head. I doubt this because it already takes a long time to print an A3 and the recovery time before the next sheet is fed and printing is only a few seconds. Also, they could just slow down the printing (like they already do on certain papers).

Canon does make printers that will do panos, but they have roll feeders (http://www.usa.canon.com/cusa/profe..._printers/imageprograf_ipf6100#Specifications ).

 

[ni9eofse7en]

Yes nice price too. Its down to Canons marketing I suppose, there seems to be no logical reason why the Pro9000 can not do big pano's as you write, other than to to sell this feature on more expensive units. It might also be that they can not compete with Epson so have simply given up trying, who knows really.

I might try it on my old R265 sometime in the future, its only A4 wide but can do pano's.

 

[ni9eofse7en]

Had to write another post, on 13 and that can be considered unlucky, had enough of that at the mo. So........

Just got hold of some Harman Crystljet Gloss and Luster RC paper direct from the factory, on BOGOF at this time. I have so far only tried the the gloss and its good. A B&W print done greyscale is just that a very good B&W print, the identical print done on Ilford Galerie Smooth is a bit warmer. The original image is over twenty years old shot on a Pentax K1000 using Ilford B&W film, then cropped and improved using Photoshop Elements 6 and finally printed with ICC profiles using Qimage, when I can I will upload a sample for your viewing. A colour shot using the same fomula as above was very similar across both papers with the Harman paper being slightly more vivid.

I also tried Rymans own Photo Gloss paper 120gsm, using the above formula and I tried using the ICC profile for Ilford as above. At 12.99 for 30 A3 sheets and a buy two get one free offer, I thought it worth a go. Reviews for this paper I have found have been less than promising but for me the overall results on around 10 prints have been very good. it is let down by the thin poor quality feel it has, and the fact that it curls if not mounted within a couple of days. Oh and it did show very faint tramlines on the darker areas, but I have found that doing a roller clean does seem to reduce this. At 40p a sheet its not that bad, the best price I have for Ilford is double that, however the Ilford is 280gsm.