gille.ws

Several articles have been recently published on the new HP Z3100.

This printer has been announced at Photokina 2006.

Here is a list of important new features for an HP printer:

• First large format printer from HP that uses pigmented inks and is in direct competition to equivalent printers by Epson (7800/9800) and now also Canon (IPF 5000, IPF 8000)
• Features a built-in XRite Eye-One spectrophotometer. The printer can calibrate and profile papers using this spectrophotometer.
• 12 colors with extra Red, Green and Blue with larger gamut (we will only look into this when we find pictures of friends and clients that need a larger gamut (our images are not very saturated and we even print more and more B&W or muted colors )
• 4 black and grays (photo black and matte black loaded at the same time like with the Canon IPF5000)
• Gloss Enhancer to avoid bronzing and gloss differential
• Clog prevention technologies
• Very high permanence rating from Wilhelm Imaging Research (>200 years). We take all these data with some grain of salt but it still proves that today’s printer manufacturers pay a lot of attention to longevity.

Some articles and videos have been published on this printer. I will talk about them in this article.

The first video is a Photokina report from Imaging Resource.

 Outbakphoto has published a testing report. Their first conclusion is good:

We like the Z3100 a lot. Matte prints are excellent and also the glossy prints are impressive.

Luminous Landscape has also published a review of this printer.

Their bottom line is also very good:

If you’ve gotten this far in the review you’ll have gathered that I’m mightily impressed with the HP Z3100. The company appears to have really sweated the details and produced what can only be called an absolutely brilliant printer. Truly state of the art.

And while the price may appear to be higher than the competition, when you factor in the built-in profiling spectrophotometer, 40GB hard drive and web server, along with 12 inks, 4 simultaneous blacks, and a Gloss Enhancer, the value for the money is clearly there. And in any event, as anyone doing production or large format printing well knows, the cost of the printer itself is ultimately found to be small compared to the eventual cost of the paper and ink which it uses over time.

They have also published a video:

 So this printer seems very impressive and Epson has finally some pressure from other manufacturers.

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