wide format

Keith Cooper Reviews the Epson 5370/5300

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Over the past two months, Keith Cooper has been posting a number of videos on his YouTube channel about Epson’s new SureColor 5370 (known as the 5300 outside the US). They’re all worth looking at, but this week he posted his final review.

The 5370s are finally starting to arrive here in the US. I’m still waiting for a unit, but I hope to have one in hand by the time our spring workshop series ends in early May. Based on Keith’s work, the 5370 looks like it will be a workhorse for print studios and pro photographers.

Review: Epson Stylus Pro 7900

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In 1999, I tested Epson’s first wide-format, photographic-quality, inkjet printer, the Stylus Pro 9000. At the time, there were a number of companies that offered wide-format proofers and signage printers, and the 9000 competed well in that space, but Epson was as interested in the nascent fine-art printing market, which was dominated largely by Scitex’s Iris printers.

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First look: HP Designjet Z3200 Photo Printer

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At Photokina in Germany, HP today announced the Designjet Z3200 Photo Printer, a wide-format inkjet printer for professional photographers and designers, with a new ink formulation, speed and paper-handling improvements and other enhancements over previous models.

The Z3200 is the successor to HP’s the Designjet Z3100 Photo Printer, which, when it first shipped late in 2006, was one of the most innovative photo printers we had seen in a long time. The Z3100 utilized 12 pigment-based inks (including a gloss optimizer) to produce high-quality, gallery-ready prints, but it was the printer’s embedded spectrophotometer (from X-Rite) and seamless integration with networked Macs and PCs that set it apart from competitors like Epson and Canon. HP spent considerable effort streamlining the process of printing: everything from unboxing the device to profiling and adding new paper types had been thought through by HP’s hardware and software engineers. The result was a printer that created top-quality prints and was a joy to use, day in and day out.

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