Canon has announced a new wide format printer, the ImagePrograf Pro 6000, a 1.5m wide 12-colour machine aimed primarily at the photo printing market.
This new printer is essentially a 12-colour version of the Pro 6000S, launched last year, which is an eight colour machine. It uses the same aqueous Lucia Pro pigment inks as the Pro 6000S albeit with more colours. That said, it’s not actually the full 12 colours that are advertised as one channel is for Chroma Optimiser, a transparent coating that’s jetted on top of the colours to improve the black reproduction and suppress any bronzing effects as well as enhancing the gloss finish of a print. The other 11 colours appear to be photo black, matte black, grey, photo grey, cyan, magenta, yellow, photo cyan, photo magenta, red and blue.
However, the number of colours doesn’t really mean anything – it’s the colour gamut that counts, something that was strangely missing from Canon’s press release. Additional colours usually mean a more expensive inkset so the key question is what sort of colour gamut do we get back for the cost of the extra colours?
The printhead appears to be a single Canon Bubblejet head with 12 channels and a minimum 4 picolitre drop size. It’s capable of 2400 x 1200 dpi resolution.
The Pro 6000 has a dual roll system so that it can be loaded with different media and can switch seamlessly between the two.
Hiroaki Shirakawa, LFP product management manager for Canon Europe, commented: “The ImagePrograf Pro series is dedicated to a high balance between print quality and productivity. Efficient media handling, and high-speed uninterrupted printing to support high-volume output are fast becoming fundamental requirements for both print-for-pay and print-for-use environments.”
It will be available across the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) from the start of this September.
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