More musings on our Canon ipf8300 inkjet

Posted by Graeme McKinstry on 22 March 2012 | 2 Comments

Tags: inkjet, inks, printing

We have had our printer for several months now, and have had a chance to get better at colour matching. Most of us at MCK have a prepress background and are as confident in CMYK colour as RGB. Recently we had a printing job that involved producing 8up imposition proofs for two catalogues that were to be offset printed in China. Altogether we printed close to 200m of proofs.

We used Preps to do the imposition (perfect binding) and produced a single PDF for printing. Adobe Acrobat Pro was used for printing with the pages being 900mm x 640mm.

Some observations:

• We used colour bars to check the colour accuracy. If we chose the wrong settings when printing these would be way off and so they were a quick visual check to see if we had everything set correctly.
• Occasionally some characters would print incorrectly or even disappear. This had also happened on a previous job as well. I am not sure whether the fault lies with Acrobat or the Canon print driver. The solution: use the Print Production Tools in Acrobat, specifically Flattener Preview, to convert all the type to outlines before printing.
• The transparency effects introduced a very slight colour variation as compared to the background. For example, the colour of the background affected by a drop shadow would be slightly different to the rest of the background. It was very subtle and not a problem for this job where the emphasis was mainly on making sure that everything was where it should be rather than perfectly accurate colour. It was, however, annoying to a perfectionist like myself, but try as I might, I couldn’t tweak any settings to make it go away. Has any one else solved this problem?
• Most used ink: Gray, followed by Red then (photo) Black
• Even with the Ink menu warning that the Black was low we were still able to produce 65 A1s before it insisted on replacing the Black ink.
• We never had any problems with the printer. Funnily enough, inkjet printers perform better the more they are used—when not used the nozzles tend to become blocked.

We have also produced quite a few watercolour prints on Lexjet Velvet Rag. This is a beautiful material that is available in large sheets.

The watercolour prints were more difficult than the proofing job (above) as we had previously printed the same artwork using our Epson 9600 and on Epson Watercolor paper, and so we had to try and match colours with these prints.

Despite this, we found that, in general, that with the new Canon printer there was much less work needed in Photoshop to tweak the colour to try and match the original artwork. (Watercolour paper tends to soak up the ink and so it much harder to maintain vibrant colours). On the Epson we use an old Colorgate RIP; on the Canon we are just using the standard print driver.

With Lexjet Gloss Canvas we found we could get an amost perfect colour match with the same print on eSatin, which is a close match with Epson Premium Lustre.

So far, then, we are very happy with the Canon ipf8300. It has run without a glitch and produced some fantastic results. Initially I was skeptical about how well it work without a separate RIP but there have been very few problems and none which can’t be worked around.