HIGHLIGHTS: Luminous Landscape reviews the imagePROGRAF PRO-2000

Mark Segal is a photographer, author and educator with a broad range of expertise in photography, scanning and printing. He is a contributor to the popular Luminous Landscape website. This was an unpaid review.

We already know the Canon Pro series is capable of delivering excellent prints—that much has been established by many of the leading reviewers in the industry. I wanted to focus not so much on the technical achievements, but on the overall experience of using one and related points of interest.

Recently I had the chance of installing and testing the first Canon PRO-2000 printer that the company received at its Toronto lab. Here’s a quick summary of what I found: Like the Canon PRO-1000, the PRO-2000 is a very fine printer and the new papers Canon has recently brought to market are lovely. The printer looks to be of very robust construction, is straightforward to set up and easy to use, and has reliable paper feeds, no channel-sharing of black inks, and a compact footprint.

Most important, it makes splendid prints if the profiles and paper quality are good, and the photos are suitably edited. With respect to profiling, I found the OEM profiles to be useful. Custom profiling is perhaps better for the super-critical—for this option, it’s best to use Print Studio Pro for printing your targets. Finally, I appreciate how Canon’s scientists went about re-examining the question of print appearance from first principles. They came up with a new set of inks and papers that go a very long way to producing tonal and vibrancy appearance.