A brief statement of assorted impressions of the new HP Z printers from time spent with them at HP’s development and design center in Barcelona.
Below are some quick impressions of the Z printers. I’ll follow up with more detailed coverage soon.
These are real nice printers. I was fortunate enough to spend time evaluating the printers over at the development center in Barcelona and talking to and offering feedback to the development engineers.
The spectrophotometer is a serious model and the supplied HP software looks to be pretty good. Third party profiling companies are producing software and drivers to support the spectrophotometer with their software for even more capability in terms of producing, editing and fine tuning the profiles.
The ink technology looked solid to me in the time I had with them and I am awaiting a development machine here for detailed testing and evaluation. Both color and BW prints looked very impressive. Impressive was in terms of color gamut, color accuracy ‘out of the box’, tonality and the initial longevity tests by the Wilhelm Institute.
They are not perfect for all applications, yet. For example they have output rollers, which can be an issue when printing on non-absorbant material, like aluminum. However four screws seemed to be all that held them on, and so I would anticipate an easy removal for those who need to.
The printers seemed very solidly made too.
HP also are providing a very solid range of media with great longevity ratings on a broad cross-section of media, not just on one or two as some printers offer. There were a good number of canvas, fine art and photo paper choices.
Epson has a solid competitor, in my view.