Canon IPF8100 worth £350?

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I need to move away from getting external printers to print my work, onto printing my own - I just seem to have problems with every order I place. I had been considering some of the larger Canon Pro desktop printers (Pro 10 / 100 / 1000) and may still do, but they're all A3+ I think, and I seem to be getting a fair few requests for A2 sized prints, or occasionally larger, and I take a lot of panoramas. I'd hate to artificially restrict what I sell, or have to go back to external printers for larger prints, if there is another solution...

A local professional print shop has a Canon IPF8100 that they are selling for £350. It's in great condition, but that's because it's been unused for a long time, since an upgrade to another manufacturer. He *thinks* the printer is likely to need a new head (maybe the existing one could be cleaned?), but it does have some inks - he'll check what it needs.

I get that this printer is enormous, the inks are expensive and needs to be used regularly, but it could print the sizes I need.

Is this just a bloody stupid idea? Or would you be thinking it could be worth a punt?
 
I (just ;) ) had to look this up.

Have you seen the cost of the 'spares' ~ a new head £286 and full ink set >£1200. I surmise that there are likely 3rd party things at a saving but surely you need to print agoodly amount to cover this printers running costs?

PS the waste ink tank is £56

PPS The fact that he thinks it might need a head..................just how long ago did he run it and as such what else about it has he forgotten in regard to it's internal condition? If it needs a service outside the scope of user maintenance it might be a very costly punt.

Just my view of such things and hope if you go ahead it 'works out for you'.
 
The carts are a whopping 700ml, so while it might seem expensive, it's actually cheap as chips - 28p/ml vs the Canon Pro 100 which is £12 for just 13 ml (almost £1/ml). That's just a really brief internet search - so might be worth looking yourself. In a printer like that you can afford to use OEM ones. I have 220ml carts in my printer (at about £80 each) and they last me a year. I just keep a saved search on eBay for carts and pick them up for around £30-40 which is silly cheap. Check to see how common the carts are - are they on eBay or readily available somewhere?

The head is the potential problem here and it's probably quite important to figure out if it's working or not. £350 for "might" isn't a good punt. If you can get them to do some test prints and determine exactly what condition its in, you can make a better valuation.

Finally, that's a big printer!! Do you have the space for it? With it printing 44", I'm guessing it's fed by roll paper which means you're either going to be wasting a lot of paper when you do print (A2 is 'only' 23"). Can you feed sheets into it? (A2, A3, A4 for example?). My 17" with roll paper feels like a waste when I print a pano that's 30 odd inches long but only 12" high. At least I can remove the roll and feed sheets of smaller paper if I want smaller prints (this also keeps the nozzles happy by doing small test prints every few days)
 
Does it have to be Canon?

I'm considering a Hp Designjet 120, it's a 24 inch printer so not as huge as that 44 inch one, and prints up to A1, can be had new for £600 if you look around.
 
Thanks all! :D

Box Brownie - you've hit a lot of my main concerns. Yep, I was conscious of the price of spares, and did see the price of a head - I'd kind of factored that in to the overall price, as still being cheaper than a higher end new A3+ printer, BUT yes, the inks are astronomical to buy (though cheap per page) - I would need to print and sell to justify it!

Harlequin - As I understand it, it can take both sheets and rolls, so is flexible in that regard, and one of the attractions of it. I've seen heads for about £300, so I'm factoring that in and if I don't need it, then great! I was kind of looking at price per page rather than price per cartridge, but as I said above, I'd need to print and sell (or write off the cost of some printing!) to justify it. I'll have a nose on eBay - I'd only been Googling generally till now. Just curious, if your carts last a year, how often do you print? They do 300ml and 700ml carts, so there is flexibility available, though the price is obviously proportionally more for the 300ml carts.

Yes, the printer is big - I'm going to check dimensions in a room I'd want to use. That's probably the biggest killer...! :p

Swissy, no, not at all - I'm flexible! I'd been put off HP YEARS ago due to the cost of cartridges and the fact that, for the printers I was buying at the time, you couldn't buy individual colours, which you could for Canon. I'd only ever looked at Canon (with a sideways glance at Epson) since. I'm guessing that isn't the case with the Designjet? Are the HP inks of the same quality / availability / longevity as Canon OEM? I'll have a look though - that could be an answer....
 
ust curious, if your carts last a year, how often do you print?


[Very Estimated Guess]
If we guess that I've been using this printer for about 2 years, I've done about 4 or 5 A2s on roll paper, lots of proof paper (9ft print of the Grand Canyon is kicking around somewhere in this forum and I also did a similarly large IR pano and all my A2s get proofed), 2 boxes of A3+ (50 prints), 2 boxes of A3 (2 calendars, 50 prints) and about 4 or 5 boxes of A4 (4 at 25 = 100 prints?). There are also a couple of prints here & there from various other test boxes and I'd guess at least 100 prints on test pack paper (my spreadhseet shows 88 tested, and there's some I just binned)

So that tots up to

2 x silly panos on proofing paper for fun (6-9ft x 12-16")
5 x A2
50 x A3+
50 x A3
200 x A4 (this sounds like a lot but obviously it equates to 100 A3s or 50 A2s)

My printer takes 8 carts and over the last couple of years I've replaced 2 Photo Blacks, 2 Cyans, 3 Magentas, 2 Yellows, 2 Light Blacks, 2 Light Light Blacks, 1 Light Cyan and 1 Light Magenta. For some reason the "light" colours don't get used as much and the Blacks get used more - which I'd expect with a mix of B&W vs Colour prints.
[/Very Estimated Guess]
 
Does it have to be Canon?

I'm considering a Hp Designjet 120, it's a 24 inch printer so not as huge as that 44 inch one, and prints up to A1, can be had new for £600 if you look around.

The Designjet 120 is an obsolete model based using 6 dye inks. There’s no mention of fade resistance in the specs but given that the similar but higher spec Designjet 130 used an improved Vivera dye inkjet that promised print longevity only when used with HP’s swellable paper (which is no longer available), I wouldn’t be too optimistic. In my experience, prints from the Vivera dye inks can fade very quickly on any other paper - a couple of months in some cases. So while the output may still be reasonably good, I wouldn’t use one of these printers for prints that I was selling, as the OP will be. The newer Designjet t120 seems to be a basic 4ink dye based printer, which also wouldn’t be ideally suited to high quality photo printing IMO.

I would say the equivalent HP models to the pigment based IPF8100 would be the (also obsolete) Designjet Z2100 or Z3100, neither of which are any cheaper than the Canon secondhand.
 
I had been considering some of the larger Canon Pro desktop printers (Pro 10 / 100 / 1000) and may still do, but they're all A3+ I think
Just FYI, the Canon Pro 1, 10 and 100 are A3+ printers, the Pro1000 is an A2 printer. It would cost a bit more than £350 though :(

Keith Cooper at Northlight Images has a lot about the Canon IPF series, and large format printing in general, on his blog - including a review of the smaller IPF5100.
 
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The Designjet 120 is an obsolete model based using 6 dye inks. There’s no mention of fade resistance in the specs but given that the similar but higher spec Designjet 130 used an improved Vivera dye inkjet that promised print longevity only when used with HP’s swellable paper (which is no longer available), I wouldn’t be too optimistic. In my experience, prints from the Vivera dye inks can fade very quickly on any other paper - a couple of months in some cases. So while the output may still be reasonably good, I wouldn’t use one of these printers for prints that I was selling, as the OP will be. The newer Designjet t120 seems to be a basic 4ink dye based printer, which also wouldn’t be ideally suited to high quality photo printing IMO.

I would say the equivalent HP models to the pigment based IPF8100 would be the (also obsolete) Designjet Z2100 or Z3100, neither of which are any cheaper than the Canon secondhand.


I thought i linked to the T which is definitely not obsolete, and it sounds like the OP doesn't want to spend too much money so this IPF8100 at £350 plus it sounds like a new print head at £286 and then £1200 for ink, 2 grand is a substantial investment, but like you say if it means his prints will last for a 100 years it's probably worth it :confused:
 
I thought i linked to the T which is definitely not obsolete, and it sounds like the OP doesn't want to spend too much money so this IPF8100 at £350 plus it sounds like a new print head at £286 and then £1200 for ink, 2 grand is a substantial investment, but like you say if it means his prints will last for a 100 years it's probably worth it :confused:
I didn’t see the link but as I said the T120 is a 4 ink dye printer compared with to the Canon which is a 12 ink pigment printer, so quality wise, there’s quite a difference particularly if you’re thinking of selling prints. The IPF8100 doesn’t need a full set of inks at the moment by the sound of it, so the outlay could be around a grand if it just needed a new printhead and a couple of inks. An A2 Canon Pro 1000 at around the same price new might be a safer bet though...
 
I didn’t see the link but as I said the T120 is a 4 ink dye printer compared with to the Canon which is a 12 ink pigment printer, so quality wise, there’s quite a difference particularly if you’re thinking of selling prints. The IPF8100 doesn’t need a full set of inks at the moment by the sound of it, so the outlay could be around a grand if it just needed a new printhead and a couple of inks. An A2 Canon Pro 1000 at around the same price new might be a safer bet though...

I've also looked at the Pro 1000 it's a huge outlay but depends on how much you value your prints.
 
Yeh, I get the outlay is going to be big either way. It's a risk as to whether I'd even sell enough to justify it, but the current situation is just unsustainable. It's kind of why £350 and a risk on the rest, and possibly sell it on for the same or thereabouts if I get nowhere, sounds better than £899+. I guess I could offer print services locally... :banana::LOL: :tumbleweed:

Getting photos printed has been my biggest headache of trying to sell work, and because I haven't been able to fully trust the quality coming out of the photo labs (and they're the big ones) meaning I haven't really tried or felt comfortable to push sales - I'd want to check the quality first. The last order was the straw that broke the camel's back. I want to take full control myself now, but it's complicated by the fact the majority of my orders seem to be >A3.

Argh.
 
PS the waste ink tank is £56

This could be zero if you don't mind getting a little bit dirty. There is W-INK trick in the service menu. It probably will work for 8100 as it does for many others in the series.
full ink set >£1200

Yup, but you could pick a dead one from ebay with a pretty full set for a two figure sum. Who cares its a little old. Used spares are getting cheap for these. But I'd preferably go with X300 or X400 as they are a little newer and better.

a new head £286

X2. And +VAT on top. That's the really nasty part. And you can't play with heads too much because if you do you are likely planning a trip to your local landfill.
 
X2. And +VAT on top. That's the really nasty part. And you can't play with heads too much because if you do you are likely planning a trip to your local landfill.

That implies it could destroy the printer, not just the head? I was thinking I could *try* to clean the heads, just in case I could get them working without replacing them, but if there is a chance I could be destroying more than just the head, then maybe not... Actually, having just looked into it a bit further, yes it could destroy the printer, so....hmm.... new head(s) it is.

How long do heads last? I'm guessing it's a "how long is a piece of string" question, but I'm I'm also guessing that more use is better than occasional use?

At the moment, 1 or 2 heads + the printer + some (but not all) ink is still around the price of a Canon Pro-1000 or an Epson SC-P800, which are really my only other realistic (new) options.


Now, to back up a little, it appears that this might actually be an IPF8000, rather than an IPF8100. The seller described it as what he thought might be a mislabeled 8000 with 12 inks rather than the 6 inks he thought was in the 8000. It seems that the 8000 DOES have 12 inks, but there is an 8000S with (8 I think) inks - so I think he has potentially misunderstood what printer he has. The print resolution is the same, the print head is the same by the looks of it (or the PF-02 has been replaced by the PF-03), it's obviously older, but I can't see any obvious comparisons between the 2. I have noticed that there is a driver for Windows 10 for the IPF8100, but not for the 8000 - I suspect the 8100 driver would work, or I could find a way to resolve, but it's one obvious issue I've seen.

I'm also seeing that moving a primed printer could be a major headache, and my bet is that this is a primed printer. Hopefully I'll get a bit more info tomorrow, but I can't help thinking it could be an OK deal, or it could be a money pit, but it isn't a steal and is possibly a risker bet than I'd prefer. So I now need to consider alternatives.

Just to add to my motivation, even my replacement reprints from the print shop have come back with printing or dispatch faults - it just reinforces that printing myself is the only good option. I'm guessing I'm just unlucky, because I can't see how anyone can run a business with this level of uncertainty about a supplier (one of the big ones) - what you're going to be get back, and when you're going to get it.
 
That implies it could destroy the printer, not just the head?

Absolutely. I had made one journey to the landfill after a botched clean attempt. Good job that one only cost me £0.99 + a much heftier diesel bill for pick up and I could pull out all the inks and papers. I you know what you are doing you may be OK, but it may just as well fry all the circuits, namely the main board, which is when you get "Close Upper cover" error. Never buy one with that except for inks. Also never reuse waste ink chip from a dead printer.
 
I'm also seeing that moving a primed printer could be a major headache

Just take the risk. If you are going to drain all the ink there is absolutely zero point in buying one. You can remove it from the stand and just load it flat to a large estate, SUV or preferably a van with a soft suspension and take it easy driving. Never tilt it when loading or unloading. That is the key part. You'll need a couple of strong men to handle that beast. 6-series are a little easier to load and carry. Just make sure you have a clear way through the doors and ideally NO stairs or worse tight staircases. I had to abandon 8-series purchase after initial space assesment.

Now, to back up a little, it appears that this might actually be an IPF8000,

It should be rather obvious what it is. The number is printed with big bold white letters on the front.
I would make sure you have drivers available for you main system or it will be a massive pain, and no, virtual environment won't be very easy with colour management across the board. On a mac I think x300 is the earliest supported?

How long do heads last? I'm guessing it's a "how long is a piece of string" question, but I'm I'm also guessing that more use is better than occasional use?

I am afraid that may be the answer. I've seen posts claiming replacements every year, some say regular use keeps them healthy for a lot longer. Mine has original 8 year old heads, and only did 96sq m (now 220 - 6 months later). Right one is perfectly fine just grey is a little bit messy in the service mode pattern check (fine in normal). Left may be a problem though. Dark cyan tends to dry out quickly which is either head leaking air (i.e. need new one), or air getting sucked in somewhere in the ink lines or tank. You may easily run in to problems like this even after buying a healthy machine and may be running around like a chicken with the head cut off not knowing where to start. Engineers can be expensive and may just default to selling 2 new heads to start with, following up with expensive full purge. The trick is to find a right engineer and I'd love to get some recommendations by the way. That cyan issue needs sorted.

Just to add to my motivation, even my replacement reprints from the print shop have come back with printing or dispatch faults - it just reinforces that printing myself is the only good option. I'm guessing I'm just unlucky, because I can't see how anyone can run a business with this level of uncertainty about a supplier (one of the big ones) - what you're going to be get back, and when you're going to get it.

You have probably hit the supplier that doesn't understand colour management, has defective equipment or someone who just doesn't care. You should be getting quite reasonable output, but certainly not as well optimised as you could do yourself. They won't go through multiple proofs, none of that. First print that looks OK will be on the way to you and mostly it is good enough.

Your other alternative is special offers in the shows like The photography show coming in march. Last year they had offers for pro 2000 (£2400??) with basically a free extra ink set and obviously a standard warranty period for the peace of mind.
 
Thanks LLP - I don't mind regular use, as long as I know I need to. I think with a printer like that, it needs to be used to be sustainable, unlike my barely used and expensive to run desktop A4 photo printer, where I'm loathed to use it because it just costs so damn much / uses so much ink to print!

A quick google seems to suggest that there might be 3rd party drivers for Windows 10 (or viruses pretending to be) but nothing native on the Canon site. Hmm.. As for knowing what printer it is, yep, you'd think he'd know, but it's only whilst doing my due diligence I've realised he's misunderstood the model specifications. I think it's a genuine mistake rather than anything to worry about.

As for my supplier, the prints themselves look fine and I'm not often concerned about colours, but I've had creases down prints or on the edges, spots on the borders, yellowing prints, etc over the last year. The other big lab I've used in the past charged me £600 for a £60 order, and then took over a week to refund me, so massive loss of trust there.

Good idea on the photo shows - and timing might be spot on in this case! Will look into that....
 
but nothing native on the Canon site.

Latest supported OS is win 8, so I'd pass that one on if you are on 10. 3rd party drivers don't give me a lot of confidence, and you may need to make your own icc profiles for almost any more recent papers. 8300 or the smaller versions will be fine, but 8400 is desirable, but likely more expensive.

I just wonder if the electrics in the new pro x000 series are more resilient to short circuits than the older ipfs. At least the have only a single head, but that is 50% more expensive so it is both better and worse at the same time.
 
Cool, I think that pushes the IPF8000 out of contention now. Too much of a risk, and possibly too much of a learning curve, coming from nothing.

So are you suggesting that the older IPFs are prone to short circuit, or that they're bombproof and you're questioning if the new ones will be too?

Now, whether to kill this thread and ask the obvious next questions on a new one or not...! I think I might because people might look past this post cos of the title....

Thanks LLP and everyone else, have appreciated your input! :D
 
So are you suggesting that the older IPFs are prone to short circuit, or that they're bombproof and you're questioning if the new ones will be too?

If they were bombproof you wouldn't see a gazillion of them on ebay with close upper cover messages. I imagine if you are careful with the heads and servicing you may avoid or delay that, but that's still poor show from Canon. The new ones haven't been around for long enough to really know I guess. But don't worry epsons are full of schiff too with their printheads and these can't be even changed without taking the whole printer apart.
You'll just have to get the latest ipf or buy a brand new one or look at Epson or even HP. If you are looking at pro 1000 just keep in mind it doesn't accept rolls of paper and can't do panos.
 
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