Canon - imagePROGRAF PRO-1000

Finally a post I feel qualified to answer. Judging by what you look to get out of this printer I think you will be very happy with your choice. You will be able to print from 4x6 all the way to 17 by 25 in sheet form or with a firmware upgrade you can feed I think sheets as long as like 40 something inches. I have the pro 1000 and have had it since 2021 I think. I love the colors the sharpness and the over all quality of the prints. I print for other people and it always wows them. Like I’m sure you have read print at least once a week it avoids the maintenance cycles but also try and just leave it on. I have found that it prevents clogging. I would highly recommend you source your papers from red river the are based out of Texas and have fantastic customer service great pricing and the quality of the papers I have noting but good things to say about it. Luster 300, palo duro baryta, soft gloss rag. Are some of my favorite ones. Metallic is pretty popular too among the people who print through me. They also sell the inks for your soon to be new printer among many other printing needs and wants. I also highly recommend you purchase a printing rip. I use Qimage one. It’s affordable and trust me when I say the color accuracy is sooo much better than printing through photoshop or Lightroom. Also sharpness is much better as well. Lastly look into a calbrite calibration tool for your screen it really helps when editing and ensuring the colors your see on your screen is what you get on your print. It also allows you to make custom printing profiles for each paper you receive. Ink seems to last a good while many many prints. I would advise to monitor what you see draining the fastest and keep spares in hand and at least one extra Maintenance cartridge. They seem to fill up fast if you’re doing big print runs. If you have any questions please let me know. Hope this helps!!

Of course my pleasure!! Ok so I have probably done 4 maybe 5 tank replacements of all the ink tanks. Not all at once of course. I find that the MBK PBK and GY tanks run out the most for me. I should mention that the chroma optimizer runs out the most often since it’s used on basically every single print you will be making. The reason I figured out to just never turn it off is because I did have it off for a period of many months. And I found it was such a pain in the ass to get it back up and running smoothly again. Would get stuck in these prolonged cleaning cycles wasting a whole lot of ink and filling up the maintenance cartridge quickly. And it started running into feeding issues where the printer would just not grab the sheets and then would again get stuck in this weird cycle of wasting ink. It was a whole thing. But once I got eveything up and running again and following best practices to maintaining the printer it works pretty much flawlessly. Don’t be like me and neglect your printer if and when you get it. Other than that there has been no major repairs or anything of that sort. Nothing that is not user serviceable has been done to it. Another suggestion get a dust cover for it. I find it helps with helping the feed slots clean and will ensure your rollers don’t have feeding issues. All printers will eventually need the rollers cleaned but this makes it so you don’t have to do it as often.

Canon and Epson are probably going to be your best to brands to pick from if you want true professional print quality at home. Canon makes their Pro line of printers (pro 200/300/1000) and Epson has the P700 and P900. Each will have their pros and cons, but overall you'd be happy with any of them most likely. These are not your regular inkjet printers you'd buy at an electronics/office store. They are proper professional photo printers. Canon Pro 200 will print up to 13" wide, so it would work for you very well. I think it's about $600 USD. The real question is, is buying a pro printer worth it for you? It's a combination of cost/savings vs a print shop and then the control you'll have over your prints. If this is for just printing your photos for personal use, then it's probably not going to be worth the cost. Printing A4 prints at print shops isn't THAT expensive. But buying a $600 printer and then spending a bunch of money on ink refills and potential wasted paper/ink, probably won't be a cost effective option for you if that's the goal. You'd either need to print a lot to hit a break even point for personal use, or just be that demanding in regards to your prints to want more direct control over how they come out, to make buying a pro printer worth it.

The Pro-1000 does not need regular use, other than I don't like my equipment not generating revenue. It cleans it's ink lines to avoid clogged lines and heads. Older Epson printers do need a lot of routine maintenance, but this Canon has needed a total of one cleaning of the print path in two years.

I have this printer as well, and it sees regular use from me. We sell photography at air fairs in the summer months, so for three months out of the year it's handling our production runs. In the off season we use it for hard proofing new work. It hasn't been that expensive to maintain, but fully restocking the ink is no joke. It's about $700 for a full set of inks. I go through about two and a half of those in a year. The deal is that it's still much cheaper than sending our work out for commercial reproduction. We love the look of frameless metal prints, and they sell quite well. After calculating the profit on our best show, the production costs ate most of it. So I invested $150 in a cold laminator and we'll be printing our own and mounting on aluminum composite panels for the upcoming season. Because I can charge at least as much money, but keep a whole lot more of it because I am not paying a lab to do that for me.

A couple hundred note cards, and probably a hundred 8x10 prints. Someone linked to the printing price guide at Red River Paper, and Is encourage you to look at that. It gives a thorough breakdown of the costs for different printers.

I'll second this. The user experience on a Canon is fantastic. Especially because it will diagnose most problems on its own and tell you what to do. Epson is less fun, and you will have to become a printer mechanic.  Among other things, Epson doesn't drain the ink lines during idle cycles. Ink will dry in the lines and in the head. Cleaning those out is no fun. And recharging the lines after that cleaning cycle uses a lot of ink. Also, you aren't firing up the printer for a way to pass the time, you are wanting to print stick to sell. That printer maintenance time is lost production, which is expensive. I can buy a lot of ink for the cost of a show where I run out of product.

I own the Canon Pro-1000, the predecessor to the 1100. It is a magnificent printer. It can't printer wider than 17 inches, but you can definitely buy 17" rolls and print as long as you want. I would strongly encourage Canon over Epson. It's like the difference between a Honda motorcycle and a Harley Davidson. HD bikes are great if you're mostly interested in the brand name and want to spend more time wrenching than riding. I honestly didn't find it that hard to learn how to print. I use the ICC profile from my paper supplier (Red River), and print using the Professional Print and Layout utility from Canon. I load custom paper profiles to my printer from my paper supplier. There is a manually triggered process to transfer printer's paper profiles from the printer to the software, but it's easy. I get very consistent results. There will be learning. I haven't found the learning costs to be prohibitive. I don't run large batches, and I keep tweaking until I have a good hard proof. I hard proof on my cheapest photo paper in 8x10. Once the hard proof is locked in, I print what I'm going to need for the immediate future, so I'm not sitting on a bunch of unsold stock. Especially because there's no way to predict how well a print will sell until customers see it.

I found the Canon Pro-1000 to be a solid investment. It paid for itself after 3 shows. it can take 350 GSM paper without any problems. In a pinch it can print on canvas. Red River offers excellent support for their paper on this printer. The cash outlay is no joke, but it's durable, reliable, and definitely cheaper than buying the same consumer grade printer multiple times. Ink cartridges are expensive but last a long time. Red River has a good break down of the cost per page of many common printers. The Pro-1000 stacked up well there, and that made the decision easier.

Hi, I had a Canon Pro-1000 for 5 years. I enjoy printing and doing my own prints, and I also want the best quality when I do. The issue is that I don't print very regularly—I make a few prints every month or two, but the printer otherwise sits. That has resulted in burning through a lot of ink through Canon's head de-clogging and ink agitation process every time the printer is powered on. The head ultimately failed as well. Any recommendations for a printer with 13"+ capacity and archival inks which might be better suited for infrequent use?

Good points. From my experience with the last Pro-1000 I bought, it came with about half full ink tanks. It's possible that lower level of ink was just due to the amount that got pulled into the lines when I first set it up, but I do think it actually came with less than full tanks. I talked to the most technical Canon printer support person that CPS could get me on the phone with today and they said that not turning the printer off will help it save ink by avoiding that cleaning process, as it doesn't know how long it's been off when you first power it on, so it does the whole process every time. They said that otherwise there isn't anything else in the pigment ink segment of the Canon line that would be noticeably more economical with ink. Perhaps a dye-based pinter might consume less. So perhaps leaving it on all of the time and then printing once a week could be an approach. Another might be to turn it on even less and just bulk print every few months. But perhaps that could lead to larger failures and significantly clogged heads more prematurely. Assuming that's the correct answer from Canon, I'm interested if anyone has experience with other brands that might serve me better. Seems like I might just be up against the physical properties of the ink drying up.

After years of using a colour laser printer where I did not need to buy toners after the first time, I have switched to a canon pro 1000 which has 12 cartridges that will finish ridiculously fast. If I knew the difference in quality of photos that will bring me, I’d have done this switch years ago.

Always shop by looking at the cost of a full set of ink cartridges. Printers always come with a short-filled set so plan on buying a full set quickly. Also, based on my experience with a Canon PRO-1000, check to see if needs a “maintenance cartridge” (aka dump tank). If so, shop around and plan to buy up in bulk. I needed one around the time I had to do that full ink set. Amazon had them for like $40 each. B&H had them for like $14.95, and they’d do free shipping if you spent at least $45. Ok, I’ll buy four. Guess what? I went through them almost as fast as went through that ink set.

The 1100 might come with a full set, but my 1000 certainly did not. Levels were at 25% at best right out of the factory-sealed carton. As far as the dump tank goes, it's not the individual price tag, it's the run rate. Same with the inks. "Know your costs" as the expression goes.

If you have ink it could be a deal, they sell it new at canon.ca for 499.99 can $ but discontinued in USA. I own a Prograf PRO-1000 and all 12 cartridge together cost 910$ at canon.ca store but you could find aftermarket kit for 600$ .. funny because the printer cost 1500$ and come with ink ... it's why people call them ink eater, ink is the asset, not the printer

For selling art prints, you'll want pigment-based inks and something that handles thicker paper. I'd look at the [Epson SureColor P700](https://metadoraffi-eng.github.io/shopit?Epson+SureColor+P700) - it's designed for photographic prints with archival pigment inks. The [Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1000](https://metadoraffi-eng.github.io/shopit?Canon+imagePROGRAF+PRO-1000) is another solid choice for art reproduction. Honestly, moving up from consumer EcoTanks to these models makes a huge difference in color accuracy and print longevity for selling artwork.

I don’t recommend Epson at all due to non replaceable and non serviceable print heads. I recommend Canon Pro 1000 series printers.

I run a Canon Pro 1000 and 4100 and they are superior machines to any Epson hands down. I’ve had them both for 5 years now and just replaced the print heads. I was able to find them directly from Japan for $500 Canadian which is a great deal for me.

I make my own prints on a Canon PRO-1000. I would say it’s a horrible investment. I certainly haven’t sold enough prints to cover it. However, being able to produce my own prints has been a delight anyway. I wanted full creative control over the whole process and for that, it’s been worth it. If you crack the code on making money selling prints I’d love to know. I offer prints to clients and almost no one has cared to order them.