| Product: |
Canon imagePROGRAF IPF600 |
| Date: |
05/03/08 (152 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Quality, reliability under pressure, capacity, relatively quick prints
Disadvantages: Canon support, input options, memory (for large data prints)
It's a canon thing
I've used this printer for about 2 years now
I honestly don't know where to start. I think the best point is purchase cost, £2000 get's you an A1 photo quality roll fed printer, with an A3/A4 cassette, a stand and paper catch basket. I believe
The reason for chosing this printer over others was price. The practice originally had an overworked HP 120 A1 printer, that gave up quite quickly, due to the excessive frequency of use. It was also annoying because it was A1 sheet fed.
Although Canon invest in R&D, they have the worst customer relations in my opinion.
PAPER INPUT
This is a slight weakness for the iPF600, it was advertised 'with optional rear feed' (for thick media), but requires you to disassemble half the printer in order to use this function. Also if you want a single sheet of 'unique' media, you either have to put it in the tray and change the settings or to eject the roll and insert at the top.
PAPER OUTPUT
output management is quite good with a flat tray or catch basket, although the latter only holders about 8 rolled up A1's and promptly overflows.
INFORMATION
The display and print outs provide a wealth of information, such as remaining roll length, ink used in EACH of the last dozen or so print jobs,
RUNNING COSTS
I don't think this is unreasonable, Ink cartridges cost around £50 each (C,M,Y,Bk & 2x Matt Bk) and are 125ml in capacity. It feels like they last forever, but in practice I would say a good few months each. It's very tricky to accurately state how long the ink cartridges last due to the various print jobs I do. There is a Maintenance Tank as well at a cost of £64, amusingly this is simply a plastic tray with a lid on top, filled with sponges...you could call it a drip tray instead I suppose. I just loaded the 2nd Maintenance Tank in 1 year of use. BE WARNED - there are very few outlets for consumables for this printer, that means prices stay high.
Print heads haven't been changed yet (in 2 years approx) and it would warn if they needed replacement.
DOWNSIDE
Day to day, it's very good and seldom gives problems - I would say less hassle than our previous DesignJet 120. Despite this, 2 weeks after the 1 year warranty expired a fault presented itself in the form of a warning on the display "W:Level 1". Printing out a status report allowed me to deduce it was a 'Parts Status' warning....mainly because it was under a Parts Status Subtitle with other random text. The original Suppliers, Design Supply, although friendly have been incredibly inificient and a great deal of my time has been taken up chasing them. Oddly, the chasing was needed AFTER paying £300 by credit card for additional support. After 2 days I was given a reference number and Canon's relevant phone number. Canon have been equally useless and to cut a long story short, this is the last time I recommend Canon as I'm continually embarrassed when clients return to me and complain. Please note, these aren't partially computer literate residential users, but IT Tech's in small to medium companies, so they know their thing and aren't complaining about trivial things.
One of the best things about large tech companies like canon, is when an 'on-site engineer' is required, they save time by not briefing him. Therefore he must do the research on the faulty part on-site, at a high per hour rate. It makes logical sense really, a company wouldn't want to be more streamlined by allowing research to be done 'back at the office', as that may be difficult to time track - i.e. charge. It matters not that I repeated the same error code over half a dozen times, the engineer standing by my side had no information whatsoever, I wouldn't be surprised if he knew what machine he was going to look at until he arrived. 'Canons little assets'.
The conclusion so far, I rang support and told them the code. They said I need an engineer. The engineer arrives with no idea I had already told head office the fault code. He doesn't know the fault code. He rings a colleague who also doesn't know, but suspects it refers to the printhead needing replacement. The big question: If support knew what the fault code was, how come the engineer doesn't. And it it is a printhead issue, why didn't support just say, "you need to replace the printhead". In the end, he returned, pressed a few buttons (resetting maintenance values) and voila, one working printer.
The only other problem is possibly the (genuine Canon) ink tanks themselves. They seem to not communicate with the printer and give the false impression they are either not installed or empty - when in actual fact they're at least half full. Fortunately Design Supply have refunded so far, but I suspect they won't want to continue this practice.
CONCLUSION
It is a very good networkable printer with multiple function, and incredibly reliable apart from the odd problem.
Summary: Would buy again if Canon changed the design slightly
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