Printers, Paper & the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1000

Let me warn you, this is a printer review, but a lot more than that. I intended this show to be about 30-45 minutes, but yeah, didn’t work out that way. Even after finishing the sessions I did, I tried to edit it down, but in watching it back I just felt the info was useful. If it helped me, then I thought it might help you too, so I am leaving everything in, To help, I am including time stamps below so that you can directly jump to any of the four segments you want to see. I hope you enjoy the review, and here is an explanation of how a simple review turned into something much deeper.

Back in February of 2019 I was at WPPI in Las Vegas, and I was at the Canon booth interviewing them about the EOS R and other new products. While there, I got into a conversation Canon’s Jim Booth about printers. During that chat I explained that I am big advocate for printing your images. There is something magical about holding a physical print, a feeling you just don’t get holding a smart phone or table, let alone seeing an overly compressed image on those social media platforms – yes, Facebook, I mean you.

At that time I owned a Canon Pixma PRO-100 printer, which I mostly liked. Jim suggested I would like an imagePROGRAF PRO-1000 much more, and he offered to send me one for testing and review. For the purpose of a review I wanted to be sure I was free to say anything I wanted, good or bad, so I offered to send to printer back when I was done, but was told I could keep it regardless. For me, being able to fully honest is the key, and them telling me to keep it no matter what was interesting…. it seemed like they already knew what I would think.

During the setup, test prints, and testing of the user experience I quickly realized how little I knew about printing. This would be my third photo printer, but I was clearly in need of some additional info. I could read the specs to you all day long, but you could read those yourself, not to mention that there are a ton of reviews based on specs. I wanted to go more towards the real world experience of using a printer in this pro category vs a more prosumer product. That’s when I decided to get Jim on to give an explanation of the feature of the PRO-100, going beyond specs alone, and even just talking about the pro printer world as a whole.

One other area I wanted more info on came up during the test print phase of the review. I printed all the test images on both my Pixma PRO-100 and the imagePROGRAF PRO-1000, and on one specific photo something weird happened. I printed it to a matte paper, but on the PRO-1000 it came out looking completely different, and it even had a sheen to it. So while the PRO-100 copy was the expected flatter appearance, the PRO-1000 copy had a much more noticeable pop of color. It took me a bit to reverse engineer why, and I realized that the paper type selection suggested for that paper on the PRO-1000 most likely caused the printer to use the Chroma Optimizer. That made me really start looking at my test papers, the suggested settings for those papers, and why I was using those papers with a specific image. I needed a paper expert, which led me to contact Drew Hendrix, the President of Red River Paper. Drew and I spent good amount of time talking about the role paper plays in being satisfied with a print.

Please join me as we try to get a better understanding of printers and paper, along with a review of the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1000.

Segment Times

Unboxing: 2:30
Canon Interview: 5:15
Red River Paper Interview: 28:44
Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1000 Review: 1:05:47

Light Stalking

The Best Photo Printer in 2019 And Why You Will Want This One

Print Cost Table (Choose a Paper Size):

Test Images

Northlight Images Test Image for Black and White Printing
Datacolor Test Image from Northlight Images

Images Referenced in the Show