Wide-Format Technology Earns Awards for Canon and HP

The Buyers Laboratory (BLI) has honored wide-format devices from Canon and HP with Pick and Outstanding Achievement Awards. The Pick Awards recognize best-in-class devices in each category based on how they fare in BLI's rigorous laboratory tests. The Outstanding Achievement Awards honor products or capabilities that stand out in categories including innovation, energy efficiency and value.

The 2015 Wide Format Pick and Outstanding Achievement Award winners are:

Canon U.S.A.

• imagePROGRAF iPF680/685
  Outstanding 24" Color Wide Format Technical Printer
• imagePROGRAF iPF780/785
  Outstanding 36" Color Wide Format Technical Printer
• imagePROGRAF iPF785 MFP M40
  Outstanding 36" Color Wide Format Technical MFP

Hewlett-Packard

• HP Designjet Z5400 PostScript ePrinter
  Outstanding 44" 6-Color Wide Format Graphic Arts Printer
• HP Rear Stacker Design
  Outstanding Achievement in Innovation

Canon Models Increase Productivity

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 superiority in reliability, productivity and 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.

Ease of use is another strength of the Canon wide format devices. The large 22" touchscreen 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 virtually all the information users will need.

HP Lauded for Six-Color Graphic Arts Model and Rear Stacker Design

Employing six colors instead of the eight to 12 that are characteristic of most graphic arts printers, the HP Designjet Z5400 PostScript ePrinter delivered a performance that earned it BLI’s 2015 Pick for Outstanding 44" Six-Color 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 gray halftones, and fine shadow and highlight details with minimal graininess and no banding," said Sweetnam.

Other factors contributing to its selection as a BLI Pick were its reliable performance when producing 10,000 square feet of output; excellent utilities; very good color management, including Pantone emulation; and very good ease of use.

Hewlett-Packard was also honored 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 reduces 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.