Wide format devices from Canon and HP have been honoured with Pick and Outstanding Achievement awards from Buyers Laboratory LLC (BLI), the independent authority in the document imaging industry. BLI’s prestigious Pick awards acknowledge the best-in-class devices in each category based on their performance in BLI’s rigorous laboratory tests. Outstanding Achievement Awards acknowledge products or capabilities that stand out for attributes such as innovation, energy efficiency or value.
The 2015 Wide Format Pick and Outstanding Achievement Award winners are:
- Canon imagePROGRAF iPF680/685 – Outstanding 24″ Colour Wide Format Technical Printer
- Canon imagePROGRAF iPF780/785 – Outstanding 36″ Colour Wide Format Technical Printer
- Canon imagePROGRAF iPF785 MFP M40 – Outstanding 36″ Colour Wide Format Technical MFP
- HP Designjet Z5400 PostScript ePrinter – Outstanding 44″ 6-Colour Wide Format Graphic Arts Printer
- HP Rear Stacker Design – Outstanding Achievement in Innovation
Canon Models Bring New Levels of Productivity to CAD and Technical Professionals
Following last year’s wins for its graphic arts models, this year Canon builds upon that success with Pick wins for three of its technical wide format models. All three of these Canon models demonstrated flawless reliability, exceptional productivity and very good image quality.
“Whether printing a single page, multi-page files or multiple technical documents of different formats in quick succession, all of these imagePROGRAF devices outperformed their competitors in terms of speed, in some cases by a very large margin,” said David Sweetnam, head of BLI’s European Research and Lab Services. Canon’s unique sub-ink tank is a further boost to productivity by enabling on-the-fly ink tank replacement without interrupting a job in progress.
Ease of use is another strength of the Canon wide format devices. The large 22″ touch screen on the iPF785 MFP M40, combined with the SmartWorks MFP software, enables highly intuitive scanning, copying and printing, but even the smaller panels on the print-only iPF680/685 and iPF780/785 provide quick access to key functions and tasks.
“Canon works very passionately to make the imagePROGRAF range of large format printers the highest quality and most reliable on the market,” said Yuichi Miyano, director of Canon Europe’s Wide Format Printing Group. “The details of the reports from BLI are very important to us as they show where Canon is achieving its goals and also where our devices can be further improved. It is a sign of our commitment that three of our devices have won BLI Pick awards and we will continue with our innovation and investment to make sure we continue this success in the future.”
HP Lauded for 6-Colour Graphic Arts Model and Innovative Rear Stacker Design
Employing six colours, the HP Designjet Z5400 PostScript ePrinter delivered a performance that earned it BLI’s 2015 Pick for Outstanding 44″ 6-Colour Wide Format Graphic Arts Printer. The only graphic arts-oriented wide format device in BLI’s database to offer dual paper rolls, “the Designjet Z5400 PostScript ePrinter produced vibrant posters on both satin and gloss photo papers, higher than average density, neutral grey halftones, and fine shadow and highlight details with minimal graininess and no banding,” said BLI’s Sweetnam.
Other factors contributing to its selection as a BLI Pick are its flawless reliability performance when producing 10,000 square feet of output; excellent utilities; very good colour management, including PANTONE emulation; and very good ease of use.
Hewlett-Packard was also honoured with a BLI Outstanding Achievement Award for the innovative design of the rear-mounted integrated output stacking tray found on a number of its models. Because it holds each sheet between a series of paper guides, the stacker eliminates the issues associated with the paper curl typical of traditional basket-style output trays that can cause problems with stacking, especially as paper nears the end of the roll. The advantages of this design are especially evident when workflow incorporates multiple media sizes. BLI’s experience showed that jobs including media sizes from A4 to A0 can be stacked neatly, allowing collated batches to be printed with minimal manual intervention or resorting after printing, which can be a valuable time saver. The stacker also has a 50-sheet A1 capacity, whereas competing solutions are commonly limited to 30 sheets.
“In the busy world of the professional CAD print user or reprographics service provider, HP’s output stacker offers great time-saving opportunities when handling large batches of work,” said Daria Hoffman, BLI managing editor.
“HP is committed to constant innovation to best meet our large format printing customers’ needs,” said Alex Monino, worldwide marketing director for HP’s Large Format Printing Business. “The Buyers Lab Pick award for the HP Designjet Z5400 PostScript ePrinter and Outstanding Achievement award for the rear stacker used in the HP Designjet T920 and T1500 ePrinters and T2500 eMultifunction Printer series demonstrate that we are meeting our customers’ needs for easy-to-use solutions that improve efficiency.”
