I love my Canon Printer... paper suggestions please.

[CB Art & Framing]

Just starting out to print in-house.
Found a great deal on Canon Pro 9000 MK2.
This is slightly older model and Canon were packaging with new model camera purchase. Lots out for sale on Ebay etc. Picked mine up for $100 (brand new).
It can handle slightly thicker media and prints up to 13" wide.

Any suggestions on paper source to get started?
I will be printing photos (for consumer supplied images) and possibly small size art & photo repros (artists).

...and GOODBYE HP.
My old printer is going in the trash, or better yet I may do a David Letterman style drop from the top of a very high building...and possibly video it in slowmo...

 

[Jesse]

Hi. I have a Canon i9900. For me, years ago when I got it, I read that canon had real problems with off brand paper. So I just stick with Canon paper. The color profiles are set up for that paper so things don’t have to change.

Something like 10 years ago I had an Epson, before things were what they are now, I had a ton of problems with color profiles between the ink, the paper, and my uncalibrated monitor at the time. So now I make my life easy and order the same brand stuff.. I’ve made some really nice looking prints on the canon 2 sided mat finish paper.

 

[CB Art & Framing]

Thanks Jesse.
I will look at Canon papers.

 

[stcstc]

some of the serious paper suppliers offer free profiles for their papers for most of the popular printers

for photo type papers i use canson and fuji

for arty type prints, canson and hanemuhle

all of these companies offer comprehensive profiles for lots of printers

 

[Steve Collins]

We have a Pro 9000 Mark II that we've had for over three years now and generally just use it for printing greeting cards these days. Any high end printing that we do happens on one of our giclee printers instead (Epson Stylus Pro 7900 and Canon ipf8300). We have had good consistent results using Canon media, mostly matte & glossy photo paper, but have also gotten good results with other media.

It's always safest to use media that you can get an ICC profile for that targets the 9000 Mark II, but there are a number of workable alternatives. For example, we often print cards using Avery Note Cards. They don't have an ICC profile that I know of, so we just set the printer driver to Glossy Photo Paper. We generally print from Photoshop, setting the driver to have Photoshop manage color. And they come out quite good.

We've been quite impressed with media we've gotten from Red River (http://www.redrivercatalog.com); everything we've tried from them works well on the Canon & they have ICC profiles for many of their products (http://www.redrivercatalog.com/profiles/canon-pro-9000-mkii-color-profiles.html). They have a square greeting card stock that we use often for one of our customers who has a propensity for painting square paintings to make into cards.

 

[CB Art & Framing]

Thanks for the info.
This may sound like a dumb question, I'm new to printing.
The ICC profile matches the printer settings to the media type?
On this type of Canon printer, what actually is the profile adjusting?
Is it print head height? speed? or amount of ink output?
Is there an obvious difference visually on finished product?

 

[Steve Collins]

An ICC profile is an industry standard means of mapping device specific differences in how colors are represented. Most modern operating systems contain a color manager (In Windows, it's called the CMM, or Color Management Module) that maps the colors between devices using device profiles to adjust things as needed to make images look the same on different devices (monitor, scanner, printer).

If you have an ICC profile for your media and device combination, you need to install it in the OS. The Red River web site has instructions, but you can get the same information just about anywhere. On Windows, you install an ICC profile in very much the same way as you install a font. Right click on the profile in Explorer and select Install.

The ICC profile doesn't affect anything but color adjustments between the system internal representation of those colors and what they need to be on the device to result in a true match. Print head adjustments and ink density are not affected, though some printers have other means of supporting those kinds of settings. For example, with Canon large format printers like the ipf8300, machine settings for specific media are handled by a media type file that you can either create yourself or get from the media supplier and that's installed in the printer using a special utility. Not relevant for the Pro 9000.

And yes, the ICC profile generally helps, in that it compensates for device specific differences, resulting in prints that more closely match the original image. There are other things to worry about, like monitor calibration, the color space used by the image, the method used to resolve gamut differences (i.e. how colors that are outside of a target device color space are mapped to those that are), etc. But, ignoring all that for now, using a profile, when possible, does lead to better prints.

 

[azoq]

And yes, the ICC profile generally helps, in that it compensates for device specific differences, resulting in prints that more closely match the original image. There are other things to worry about, like monitor calibration, the color space used by the image, the method used to resolve gamut differences (i.e. how colors that are outside of a target device color space are mapped to those that are), etc. But, ignoring all that for now, using a profile, when possible, does lead to better prints.

It's important to remember that the profiles provided by manufacturers are good only if you're using their OEM inks... if you go for another brand for inks the ICC profiles are probably pretty useless.

Having a piece of color calibration hardware frequently far outweighs its initial cost... especially when it comes to picky clients who want "exact" color matching. We bought a colormunki about a year ago and use it to calibrate all of our monitors and papers; haven't looked back yet.

If you have $500 to spare you can set yourself up for using just about any quality paper from any vendor. Making your own profiles mean that you'll have even better color accuracy with any combination of printers, inks, and papers.