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 The first thing you'll notice about the Canon ImagePROGRAF W6400 ($3,400 street) is its size—this machine isn't going to fit on you desktop next to your workstation. But it wasn't made for the desktop, it was made to make big prints, posters, and colorful banners in a hurry. And when mounted on its rolling stand, it can easily be moved from one computer to another in a print shop or large photo studio.
The W6400's forte is its printing speed and image quality when using roll media. Its advanced printing head features Canon's Bubble Jet On Demand and MicroFine Droplet Technology, and was manufactured using Canon's FINE (Full-photolithography Inkjet Nozzle Engineering). Print drops are as small as four picoliters, which helps create smooth gradations in shadows and highlights, and printer resolution is up to 2400x1200 dpi. The W6400 can handle roll widths starting at 10 inches and topping out at 24-inches (with borderless printing options), and it also accepts a wider variety of paper types and surfaces than Canon's smaller i9900 13x19-inch desktop printer. But, if you are just looking to use cut sheet media to make prints at 13x19-inches or smaller, you should consider the i9900 or wait for Canon's new 10-color i9500. The i9900 is actually faster than the W6400 with pre-cut papers up to 13x19-inches, and costs about $3,000 less.
The W6400 is a speed demon when loaded with roll media, and can make large, borderless 16x24-inch photo prints in just about 4.5 minutes, or 24x36-inch prints in 8.5 minutes. Those speeds smoke the HP and Epson 24-inch competitors. Want to cover a wall with a photo, or make a giant panoramic print? The W6400 can do either. It ships with driver software that lets you break an image into tile sections, so you could conceivably turn a 16x24-inch image file into four 24x36-inch sections for a total poster size of 48x72-inches. Tile it into eight sections or sixteen, and…you do the math.
Then there's the W6400's panoramic and banner print capability. It lets you make long prints up to an amazing 2 ft by 59 ft (using a Mac computer running OS X or higher, or up to 50 ft long using Windows XP). We stitched together two photos taken with a Canon EOS 1D Mark IIn DSLR and popped out a 23x70-inch print from the W6400 in high quality mode in only 16 minutes. Unfortunately, we didn't have a big enough space on our walls to hang it! The only time the W6400 slows down is after it has been asleep for a while. It usually takes between two and three minutes to wake up, so tack that time on if you aren't planning to keep this device working all day long.
Mechanically, the W6400 is a solid, well-built machine that is fairly quiet when printing. We spent the most time putting together its rolling stand (included) and print catcher. But loading the unit's six pigment ink cartridges (CMYKphotoMphotoC) is an easy task, and print-head alignment is fairly automatic. (According to Canon, photos made using these inks on Canon's premium photo media can last up to 70 years when displayed under glass). The printer manuals lead you through the task of loading roll media, but fall flat (pun intended) describing the loading of cut sheet media. We had to try several times to get a 13x19-inch sheet of Canon's Photo Paper Pro to load properly. When we succeeded, the printer head scanned across the paper and signified that it had determined the paper size on its two-line monochrome LCD screen (with four-way button controller), which also gives a wealth of other information. However, despite this reassurance, nearly every attempt to make a print had the image coming out at 90-degrees to the direction of the paper. We then shifted the paper so that it loaded with the shorter dimension across the platen, and met with success. So, it appears cut sheet media is best loaded vertically. But this means the printer head does each pass across the 13 inch width instead of the 19-inch length, so a 13x19-inch print with borders took over 5 minutes to produce, compared to about 3.5 minutes on roll media. Unfortunately, the W6400 doesn't support borderless printing on cut sheet media, but it does with nearly every roll media width that it handles. If you're going to make borderless prints, the manual cautions you to make sure you clean the platen after every print job, a nuisance at best.
You're in the driver's seat
Printer driver controls and other software utilities that ship with the W6400 are pretty advanced (based on the ones that loaded into our Apple G5 Dual Processor running OS X 10.43), and let you choose between a number of color management options. We performed most of our tests using Canon's Premium Super-Gloss paper (24-inch x 100ft, $90 street), and we found the highest color accuracy with prints made using Photoshop CS 2's color management turned on (in the first print window) and manually selecting the paper profile supplied by Canon. When we used the Colorsync option in the print driver and turned off Photoshop's CM, prints had a slightly greenish cast, especially in shadow areas.
Other driver controls allow you to quickly size an image for borderless printing on roll media, or apply watermarks or transparent overlays on prints. You can choose from preset watermarks (such as DO NOT COPY) or make your own custom watermarks. There's also a driver control that lets you print multiple copies of an image on a single sheet of paper (for example, four 8x12's on a single 16x24-inch print. And if you don't want the automatic cutter to operate, you can shut it off.
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