HP Z3100 Review

The recent introduction of pigment printers from both HP and Canon have finally added much needed competition to the market, which has been owned by Epson for some years now. Not being content to merely catch up to Epson though, HP has taken a large step forward with the new Z3100 and Z2100 photo printers. Both printers, available in 24" and 44" sizes, use the new Vivera pigment inks first seen in the B size HP PhotoSmart Pro B9180 printer. In fact, the Z2100 uses the same 8 ink set as the smaller B9180 which I have reviewed elsewhere in depth. For this report, I'll focus on the HP Z3100 printer, which is a 12 ink – 11 colours and a gloss enhancer – version.
The enhancements don't stop with the additional inks though. The HP Z series is also the first printer that includes a built-in spectrophotometer for creating custom profiles. If you've ever dealt with profiling a printer, you'll immediately see the benefit of this. But, any printer can sound impressive when you read the feature list – after all, people go to college to learn how to make a product sound good. In this case though, the hyperbole is deserved. The output from the HP Z3100 is nothing less than outstanding, and in twenty years of digital printing, I have never been as happy in as short a time as I am with this printer.
Pigment inks have two major advantages over dye based inks. First, archival life is much greater, with most offering 70 or more years of display life before visible fading occurs. The Vivera inks in the new HP Z series printers are rated by Wilhelm Research at 200 years for both colour and black and white prints. The other primary advantage is the variety of media available. While dye ink printers are optimized to work with luster and gloss finish papers, pigments can print on almost any surface. HP has over 20 media options with many of the fine art papers being supplied by Hahnemuehle.

credits: Jon Canfield
full article:
http://www.photographyblog.com/reviews_hp_z3100.php


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