Unboxing a Canon PROGRAF Pro-300
I know I’ve written here multiple times about how you should be printing your images and how much you can learn that improves their quality — even if you are mostly using them online.
I have a confession. The last six or seven months, my printer has been sitting idle. Just too many distractions and a lack of motivation. The motivation to haul out the camera has returned, and with it, the thought of getting printing going again came with it, especially some of the black and white conversions I’ve been playing with. So I went over to the printer — and realize that a power outage we had during the heat wave turned it off, and it’s been powered off for a number of weeks, so no ongoing print-head cleaning happening.
Inkjet owners probably understand the horror that can imply in terms of clogged printheads and the fun of cleaning them. I did a quick check of spare ink cartridges, and realized all of them had 2019 expiration dates. Which.. yeah, implies I’ve done a lot less printing than I want to admit to the last year or so, even before the pandemic hit.
In the back of my head lodged the question “Is it time to research a new printer?” I love my Epson P400, and it has served me well. Other than a fussy paper feeding system, it’s been solid and reliable — but it’s five years old. A quick check on Amazon told me a fresh set of inks would run me about $200. Whee!
The thought in the back of my head whispered “hey, that’s over 20% of the cost of a new printer”.
And so off I went to research new printers. And the good news was, both Canon and Epson had announced new printers in 2020 that looked exactly what I wanted. The bad news was, the pandemic hit and so neither the Canon PROGRAF Pro-300 or the Epson P700 were actually shipping. There were other printers available but another aspect of the pandemic is that the printers that these printers were replacing, like the Pro-1000, had stopped production and were mostly out of stock. So buying a printer of the type I wanted was out of the question at that moment. I decided to put the idea on hold, keep my eyes open, and see about getting the P400 running again.
The good news was that my first test prints looked clean, despite months of neglect. Nothing clogged. Ink levels were mostly good, so I had a number of prints I could make before I had to decide to buy new cartridges. I was having problems with the paper feeds, which had always been fussy beasts, to the point the only way I could get a sheet of paper through was to power cycle the printer. It would then print one, but misfeed on the next. I did some attempts to debug it, but never figured out why, but I was realizing that wasn’t going to be long-term viable, but for now, at least I could print.
And so for the next couple of weeks, I did a little printing and things were going fine. Then, someone I know in my photo mentoring group posted that he was considering finally buying a printer and wanted advice, so I wrote up what I’d learned in my recent research for him. While doing so, I checked Amazon to verify the naming, and realized they said they had 3 of the PROGRAF Pro-300 units in stock. I stopped, and decided to think about it a bit, and posted my notes in the mentoring group.
I checked back on Amazon, and it now had 2 in stock. I thought about it a minute, pushed the button, and a week later, I’d spent $899 and a Canon PROGRAF Pro-300 arrived on my doorstep. The box got hauled into my office, the Epson P400 hauled into the garage, and I spent an evening getting it unboxed, set up and printing.
I will say the unboxing and setup experience was mostly amazingly good. The printer is well packed and protected from the worst abuse the shipping process can give a box, and it showed up in pristine condition. Removing a big, heavy printer out of the box turned out to be easy, because it was wrapped in a plastic carrier with handles for easy lifting. Once lifted onto the table, you could quickly discard that, pull off all of the protective tape pieces and a few foam bits inside the case, and it was ready to install inks.
Where I ran into a minor hangup: the printer kept insisting there was packing material inside the unit. It took me about ten minutes of headscratching to realize there was a bright orange thing in the printer — which was otherwise all black — and it was in fact a shipping lock for the print head assembly. Removing that allowed me to move forward. The print head it self is modular and so can be replaced if it gets too badly clogged, which is nice, and so you snap it in place, and then snap the ink cartridges in place in it, and the printer asks for paper, you press a button and it goes off for ten minutes to get everything set up and calibrated.
It then spits out a nice test page and you’re ready to connect to your computers. Here’s where I ran into another glitch. I intended to hook it up to the WIFI, and while I could get the printer attached to the network, nothing could talk to it. The printer was indicating it was hooked into the 2.4Ghz network on the Eero, while everything else was on the 5Ghz network, and it seemed that kept things from communicating. I couldn’t see any way to re-jigger the network configs on the printer, so I was stumped. This seems like an obvious thing Canon should have run into and dealt with, but it was the first time that their overall really good instructions kind of failed me. I assume this was some kind of pilot error on my part, but it seems like the printer might have only 2.4Ghz wifi in it (which is less expensive that using dual-band hardware), which seems like a weird place for a $900 product to cheap out to save a few bucks.
The solution was of course simple: I used a 15’ ethernet cable and wired it to the network that way instead.
The Canon uses ten ink colors in its set. The Epson used 8, one of which was a gloss optimizer that the Canon doesn’t have, so there are actually three color additions to the Canon set: a grey ink which should improve black and white images, a light magenta and an orange, the latter likely to improve skin tones.
the Canon ink cartridges are 14.4ml (milliliter) each, where the epson were 14ml. While my initial search for carts for the p400 ended up looking to cost around $200, a more thorough search found them for $137 at B&H in a set (the original price was for buying each individually on Amazon). B&H is selling the canon replacement set for $122. So as it turns out, buying the printer instead of new inks only covered 16% of the purchase price, which still seems insanely high, but welcome to photo printers.
The Canon cartridges have 3% more ink in them, but still cost almost 10% less, so it seems in terms of ink cost per page, it’s a better value. I haven’t printed enough to see what the per-page cost will be or how long the cartridges will last.
I am super impressed with my initial prints and their quality. The black and white images I tested with show zero color cast, and the detail is sharp and crisp. the color prints are rich and vibrant and seem quite accurate to my images — even though I haven’t profiled the printer or started down the path of ICC profiles for the paper. But out of the box with standard printer settings, I’m seeing exceptionally good images with no tweaking.
That makes me happy. The printer seems quieter than the P400, and to be honest, it feels more solid and better built than the P400. The printhead mechanism is quite robust and heavy, causing the table it’s on to jiggle a bit during printing. The paper feed systems seem well designed and have a flip down flap on top intended to help prevent dust getting into the guts, something the P400 doesn’t have. I’m still covering the printer and paper with a towel when not in use to protect it all from dust, but it seems less necessary with this new unit.
I’ll keep working with the printer, and I do plan on installing ICC profiles for the paper and seeing if I notice much difference, and I’ll report back as I get more experience. Getting it set up and working was fast and easy, and getting the first prints out of it happened without problems — and the first prints out seemed good enough to be wall worthy without much of the fussing I’ve often done to really get the printer to match out the image well. That’s truly encouraging.
So while I want to do some long term followups, my initial reactions here are quite positive and I’m really happy I made the choice to upgrade to a new printer. It seems like this one will take me well into the next five years or longer quite happily.
