Canon and HP Wide-Format Devices Win BLI Pick and Outstanding Achievement Awards

HACKENSACK, NJ—November 18, 2014—Wide-format devices from Canon and HP were honored today with Pick and Outstanding Achievement Awards from Buyers Laboratory (BLI), the world’s leading independent authority in the document imaging industry. BLI’s prestigious Pick awards acknowledge the best-in-class devices in each category based on their performance in BLI’s rigorous laboratory tests. Outstanding Achievement Awards acknowledge products or capabilities that stand out for attributes such as innovation, energy efficiency or value.

The 2015 Wide Format Pick and Outstanding Achievement Award winners are:

Canon U.S.A.

• imagePROGRAF iPF680/685
  Outstanding 24" Color Wide Format Technical Printer
• imagePROGRAF iPF780/785
  Outstanding 36" Color Wide Format Technical Printer
• imagePROGRAF iPF785 MFP M40
  Outstanding 36" Color Wide Format Technical MFP

Hewlett-Packard

• HP Designjet Z5400 PostScript ePrinter
  Outstanding 44" 6-Color Wide Format Graphic Arts Printer
• HP Rear Stacker Design
  Outstanding Achievement in Innovation

Canon Models Bring New Levels of Productivity to CAD and Technical Professionals
Following last year’s wins for its graphic arts models, this year Canon builds upon that success with Pick wins for three of its technical wide format models. All three of these Canon models demonstrated flawless reliability, exceptional productivity and very good image quality.

"Whether printing a single page, multi-page files or multiple technical documents of different formats in quick succession, all of these imagePROGRAF devices outperformed their competitors in terms of speed, in some cases by a very large margin," said David Sweetnam, head of BLI’s European Research and Lab Services. And Canon’s unique sub-ink tank is a further boost to productivity by enabling on-the-fly ink tank replacement without interrupting a job in progress.

Ease of use is another strength of the Canon wide format devices. The large 22" touchscreen on the iPF785 MFP M40, combined with the SmartWorks MFP software, enables highly intuitive scanning, copying and printing, but even the smaller panels on the print-only iPF680/685 and iPF780/785 provide virtually all the information users will need.

"Canon is excited and honored to receive three 2015 Wide Format Pick Awards," noted Rich Reamer, director of large-format product marketing for Canon U.S.A.’s Business Imaging Solutions Group. "The Canon team has worked hard to develop and launch products like the iPF680, iPF780 and iPF785 that provide our customers exceptional quality when printing large format prints. We will continue to focus on ease of use, reliability and exceptional quality in order to maintain positive customer experiences."

HP Lauded for Six-Color Graphic Arts Model and Innovative Rear Stacker Design
Employing six colors instead of the eight to twelve that are characteristic of most graphic arts printers, the HP Designjet Z5400 PostScript ePrinter delivered a performance that earned it BLI’s 2015 Pick for Outstanding 44" Six-Color Wide Format Graphic Arts Printer. The only graphic arts-oriented wide format device in BLI’s database to offer dual paper rolls, "the Designjet Z5400 PostScript ePrinter produced vibrant posters on both satin and gloss photo papers, higher than average density, neutral gray halftones, and fine shadow and highlight details with minimal graininess and no banding," said BLI’s Sweetnam.

Other factors contributing to its selection as a BLI Pick are its flawless reliability performance when producing 10,000 square feet of output; excellent utilities; very good color management, including Pantone emulation; and very good ease of use.

Hewlett-Packard was also honored with a BLI Outstanding Achievement Award for the innovative design of the rear-mounted integrated output stacking tray found on a number of its models. Because it holds each sheet between a series of paper guides, the stacker reduces the paper curl typical of traditional basket-style output trays that can cause problems with stacking, especially as paper nears the end of the roll. The advantages of this design are especially evident when workflow incorporates multiple media sizes. BLI’s experience showed that jobs including media sizes from A4 to A0 can be stacked neatly, allowing collated batches to be printed with minimal manual intervention or resorting after printing, which can be a valuable time saver. The stacker also has a 50-sheet A1 capacity, whereas competing solutions are commonly limited to 30 sheets.

"In the busy world of the professional CAD print user or reprographics service provider, HP’s output stacker offers great time-saving opportunities when handling large batches of work," relayed Daria Hoffman, BLI managing editor.

Alex Monino, worldwide marketing director for HP’s Large Format Printing Business, also noted: "HP is committed to constant innovation to best meet our large-format printing customers’ needs. The Buyers Lab Pick award for the HP Designjet Z5400 PostScript ePrinter and Outstanding Achievement award for the rear stacker used in the HP Designjet T920 and T1500 ePrinters and T2500 eMultifunction Printer series demonstrate that we are meeting our customers’ needs for easy-to-use solutions that improve efficiency."

About Buyers Laboratory
Buyers Laboratory (BLI) is the world's leading independent provider of analytical information and services to the digital imaging and document management industry. For more than 50 years, buyers have relied on BLI to help them differentiate products’ strengths and weaknesses and make the best purchasing decisions, while industry sales, marketing and product professionals have turned to BLI for insightful competitive intelligence and valued guidance on product development, competitive positioning and sales channel and marketing support.

Using BLI’s web-based bliQ and Solutions Center services, 40,000 professionals worldwide create extensive side-by-side comparisons of hardware and software solutions for over 15,000 products globally, including comprehensive specifications and the performance results and ratings from BLI’s unparalleled Lab, Solutions and Environmental Test Reports, the result of months of hands-on evaluation in its U.S. and U.K. labs.

The services, also available via mobile devices, include a comprehensive library of BLI’s test reports, an image gallery, hard to find manufacturers’ literature and valuable tools for configuring products and calculating total cost of ownership (TCO) and annual power usage. BLI also offers consulting and private, for-hire testing services that help manufacturers develop and market better products and consumables.

Source: Buyers Laboratory.