Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)When I picked the Z3200ps 44" printer is was for these reasons:
1 - I wanted a pigment printer in the lab for long archive prints
2 - I needed a wide color gamut and the Z3200 ps really knocks it out of the park
3 - I like b&w photos but hate it when they turn green or yellow with age
4 - havng used 24" rolls, some charts outgrew them to 36" and finally 44" rolls
5 - media handling. Careful when you walk by this printer. It will pull your shirt off and print on it.
I've had some time to get to know the Z3200ps. It has a buit in rip and 80g disk to store your image once ripped so subsequent prints on various media are a no brainer. I bought an assortment of media from photo paper to banner paper and finally canvas which really made an impression.
The 2100 and 3200 printers use 130ml inks (but HP ships it with 69ml mini-inks like the mini-bar in a hotel). They get it calibrated and alligned but 50% of the ink is gone aftertwards. Fortunately a 20x24 canvas (heavy ink) print only used 3ml from the 1500 ml on board in 12 cartridges.
Yes thats right. 12 ink colors. Well really 11 because the gloss enhancer is clear! And it DOESN'T HAVE CYAN - JUST LIGHT CYAN. It does have magenta and light magenta. Let's cover the 12 inks
CMYPKMK:
c50% dark cyan
Mfull dark magenta
m- 50% dark magenta
Yfull dark Yellow
PK"photo black" - mixes with cmy above to avoid using cmy when dark colors are in photos. doesn't fade away from black
MK Matte black - for text mainly - shows up as matte on glossy media
RGB
GrGreen 100%
BlBLUE (not to be confused with cyan dark - it's not really blue either, more purple than blue)
RdChromatic Red (think fire engine / fast sports cars here)
B&W
LG Light Grey
GGrey (combined with photo black gives you 3 color b&w prints with no color in them - no "off black"
EGloss [E]nhancer - prevents bronzing
Now add them c, M, m, y, PK, MK, Rd, Gn, Bl, Grey, light Grey, Gloss enhancer. Yep even dozen.
You'll be happy to know the gloss enhancer, while sprayed everywhere, is only $55 instead of $78, but a full refill is $911 of all 12 carts. buying ink here on amazon will save you money over hp's price
As for printheads, yes, nozzles clog, yes, there is a cleaning step, and best of all, it knows what nozzles are clogged so with 2000+ It can average them out of the picture and prevent banding until it gets really bad. Each printhead has 2 colors assigned to it, and they are about $55. Now you can also clean just one printhead instead of all 6 of them which saves ink. Left plugged in, the printer automatically runs a periodic nozzle cleaning with minimal waste to keep them clean.
Color calibration is done with an i1 spectrophotometer for the material you are using. Tell your software to let the printer manage color and send adobe rgb 1998 to it. Then tell the printer it's getting adobe 1998 and it must mix and match. It will take a little from each color to make [carl sagan on] billions of colors.
The color gamut of this printer is only missing the metalics (a 13th cartridge would be too much), so you get accurate reproduction. It also comes with a monitor calibration system so what you see is what you get across many media.
The biggest surprise so far was the $1.28/sq ft matt universal canvas. Go for heavy inking and you'd swear an artist slaved all day to render your 12 megapixel dslr raw digtital negative into a painting. I have a roll of 24" canvas loaded now and am going to try some art reproduction with it and a scanner. You also have options to roll on clear sealer (acrylic) or use a brush and acrylic paints to turn the canvas into a real work of art.
If 44" and 12 inks isn't enough HP does make a 60" carriage, but sacrificed the 12 inks down to 8.
CONS:
Here they are
8" of each roll is needed for each new load to do a color calibration (and 20 minutes give or take)
high quality mode is slow as molassas to print
internal cutter can't cut canvas.
Carriage may be 44" but you have 6 bottles of ink on *each* side of that so the printer is wide.
postscript rip is kinda on the slow side but the good news is it keeps the finished jobs in the printers hard disk until you delete them, so you can improve your media choices without another rip and just print.
only has roll or sheetfeed - one sheet at a time. DJ130nr had a paper try, rear feed, front feed, and roll feed that could automatically take out the roll and feed from the paper tray, then revert to roll without a human.
power cords are shorter than the printer is long so be prepared.
squirt and wipe after 3 - 4 passes slows printing while carriage is in service station
Hard to find HP 70 130 ml carts in every color on [...] website - must dig around. Red is no. 73
"chromatic red" which makes me wonder about other no 73 carts
won't take the 300 ml #70 carts for the 5200 (besides wrong colors)
Plus side
Comes with GB ethernet and usb. The GB net is *NICE*
As of 7-2010 HP finally got win 7 to work with this printer. Took long enough. I had to revert to vista when I got this (ugh) and was changing o/s more often than people change underware.
Lots of space to store caibrations for medias you come across
Heavy support for fine art media
Comes with $300 stand in kit and adapters for different core sizes
comes with power cords for every country on earth
200 watts printing, almost nothing in power down mode. Adjustable delay to enter power down.
Nice b&w lcd on front for loading paper and calibrating color
orange cancel button
relatively easy to fix skew problems with the blue lever that opens up the gripper and allignment marks
To sum it up - with the introduction of the Z5200, my bet is the z3200 will drop in price soon and might make a good value then. The 5200 only uses 8 inks and is built on the same chassis as the 3200. Since the 3200 mixes from all 12 inks almost equally you get good life from 12 cartridges. Add to your watched list and watch the price drop - the 5200 was just introduced as I write this.
Click Here to see more reviews about: HP DesignJet Z3200ps - 44" large-format printer - color - ink-jet - Roll (44 in) - 2400 dpi x 1200 dpi up to 2 min/page (color) - USB, 10/100Base-TX
This 12-ink HP Z3200ps Designjet printer, with new HP 73 Chromatic Red ink, delivers long-lasting gallery-quality prints in black and white and color.
