I’m really considering buying Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1000. I never was an artist. I only did often boring commercial photography and VR panoramas etc. But over the years I’ve shot quite a few images worthy of a print. I have adited most of them but I never managed to sell it to my clients because they aren’t looking for art. I never shown my work in a gallery. And I don’t have any of it printed. I’ve only done some interactive VR experiences as an art project but that’s very different thing.
Now I have 3, more like 2 problems with this printer:
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First (and this one is a non issue actually) is that this printer doesn’t support roll paper but I’ve found out that it can actually print roll paper but since it can’t cut it, it will eject the whole roll when it’s done printing. So a solution is to cut the paper to the length of the print before printing. And canon released a firmware to allow printing larger prints so this issue is resolved.
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Second is that I don’t really know how well it works with third party, no brand inks. I’d like to use it with third party inks and not the Canon ones. I’ve heard that no brand inks are just as good as Canons and that with Canon inks you only pay for “Canon tax”. I’d need someone to verify that for me, someone who has tried it and can say that it’s fine to do.
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Lastly, my biggest problem is that there is probably no way for this printer to work with Linux. At least not with all of it’s functions being supported and that is a big issue for me.
I do have a Windows partition but that is only for Lightroom for selected images that require me to do raster masking with a brush.
As soon as Darktable gets raster drawn masks or vkdt reaches acceptable level of maturity, I’m deleting Windows forever.
Because of that I’m hesitant to invest in a printer that doesn’t work with Linux and that will most likely force me to have a windows partition.
Maybe it could be installed trough wine if anyone has any experiences?
And maybe I could use it in a seamless VM setup. I can’t really use Lightroom like that without having a second GPU and doing passtrough but It might work well for a printing software.
Anyway, to answer your question, yeah, I’m really interested in a printing forum here.