A Day in Printerville

Last week, I had the chance to spend some time with Macworld editor-at-large Rick LePage in the Printerville testing lab. Rick’s printer reviews appear regularly in Macworld where he reviews printers big to small, including the HP Designjet Z3100 and the Canon ImagePROGRAF iPF6100. While there, I got to spend some quality time with the large format printers and generally geek out with Rick about the current state of the printer industry.

By “spend quality time with the large format printers,” I really mean that Rick let me hook up to the 24" Z3100 via USB and just go to town making some big prints of some of my favorite photographs. As a photographer, I really can’t say enough about how amazing it is to watch your work being printed in high quality on big media. You see things about your photographs that you’ve never seen before.

The Z3100 is an amazing machine. Before hooking it up to my laptop, we put a roll of Canon Polished Rag into the HP printer and then went out for a cappuccino while the printer printed test targets, let them dry, and then used its built in spectro to make a ICC profile. Sure, it sounds odd at first to put Canon-branded paper into an HP, but Rick had been impressed with how it looked in the iPF6100 and, since the HP makes it so easy to profile, why not give it a try? When we returned, the profile was built and stored on the printer’s internal hard drive. Then, when I hooked up my laptop, the profile was automatically pulled over to my system and setup for use.

The best part was that the profile was dead on. From my perspective, all I had to do was select the paper and size to use and then print as normal. The results were awesome. And, since the printer is network enabled, anybody else could have shown up with their laptop, set up the printer, and used the same profile to make prints. This is just the kind of printer ability that would be great to have in a classroom or studio environment where you want everyone using the printer to have easy access to the printer’s full abilities.

Spending time in the Printerville lab was also a chance to really talk with Rick about the economics of ink. Buying a small letter sized printer with its teeny cartridges is fine for an occasional casual use. But if you are doing any amount of printing at all, the per-ml ink cost drops fast enough that you'll save on ink costs in short order. For example, for what you’ll pay for a 13" wide Epson 2400 and enough replacement cartridges to equal what ships in a 17" wide Epson 3800, you might as well go ahead and buy the 3800.

This really hit home when the big printer aborted a print because it needed a new Light Grey cartridge. I was almost flabbergasted when Rick told me that it was the first time that particular cartridge had been replaced since he got the printer for evaluation and writing up the article last year. And, it was only the third cartridge of any kind to be replaced in the printer. The real kicker was that the replacement cartridge was twice as big as the ones that came with the printer. Those big cartridges aren't cheap, but boy do they last.

The whole discussion about ink costs is a big one and Printerville is looking at it with a keen eye, including sorting out how best to measure ink cartridge life. Suffice it to say that I think my next printer for my studio will be bigger. I’m not sure how much bigger, but I print enough that the cost savings will be realized in short order and the ability to print larger will be welcome.

My only regret about my visit to Printerville is that I had so much fun playing with the Z3100 that I didn’t spend enough time getting a better feel for the 17" Epson 3800 or 4880. Now that I’m looking for a replacement candidate for my currently ailing HP 9180, it would have been good to spend some time with this class of machines outside of a store. Hopefully, I’ll get another chance to do this.

Overall, this was a great opportunity. It's rare to be able to get a good insight into the range of solutions available for printing in an environment that isn’t either a trade show or a computer store. I’m certainly no stranger to printers, but the opportunity to spend a few hours with Rick was eye opening, both from the standpoint of what the different kinds of printers can do and how to use them effectively. It’s the kind of opportunity I wish more photographers had.