Canon ipf5000 Diary – initial impressions

I’ve had the new Canon ipf5000 inkjet printer for just over 2 weeks, and aside from a few hiccups the first few days, it’s working and printing beyond my expectations. I received one of the infamous defective roll feed units, and after a call to Canon support, a technician arrived at my studio a few days later with replacement parts and repaired the problem.

I also upgraded the printers firmware to the latest version, as well as the driver and software for my PowerMac G5 running OS 10.4.8. I then downloaded all of the profiles for the papers I planned on using from BookSmart Studio, an excellent resource for free generic and custom printer profiles for many fine art papers and printers. Thanks to Eric Kunsman for the variety and quality of the profiles which gave me great results. The Canon ipf5000 wiki has also been a great resource for the many questions I had about the printers operation…the included manual is fairly useless.

I’m getting ready to participate in several art shows this year, so I wanted to use the ipf5000 to print the majority of the images, especially since it can print up to 17 x 25 borderless using roll paper. My favorite papers right now are Crane Museo Silver Rag, an excellent fiber-based semi-gloss paper, and Innova Fibaprint Ultrasmooth, a very fine matte paper. I also use Hahnemuhle Photo Rag and Fine Art Pearl, depending on the image and size. The ipf5000 produced excellent results on all of these papers, with saturated colors and deep blacks, and beautiful blues and reds, due I’m sure, to the 12 ink cartridges. Skies looked much more realistic and had more depth than what I was used to on my Epson R2400, and black and white prints display rich blacks and very good detail in the shadows. More on fine art papers in my next post…

The biggest surprise has been the efficient use of ink, especially since replacing all of the cartridges costs almost as much as the printer. Considering that the cartridges that come with the printer are only 75% full, I still have 60% on all of the inks after making about 35 prints. These were all 13×19 and 17×25, which really show how economical this printer is with ink. I’m sure I’ll be able to print all of the images I need for the fist two shows without needing to purchase any new ink, about 100 prints in total.
So far I’m extremely pleased with the printer’s performance, and I’ll post another entry with more impressions in a few weeks when I finished with the prints I’m working on.