Heidi—and our office printer, Gutenberg—just got a new sibling: the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-4600! After some internal discussion and feedback from our social media, we’ve decided to call it HAL. Not only does it feature menacing red lights to indicate ink status, but it will also be used to print the illustrations for our upcoming Roman numeral edition and lettered edition of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I’ve always admired giclée illustrations and dreamed of incorporating them into our editions one day. Just as it was with letterpress, so it is with this—because it was only a matter of time before we took things into our own hands, so to speak. This beast offers the very best in image reproduction, and its 12 ink cartridges ensure that colour precision and vibrancy remain paramount. While not as large as Heidi, it is still quite a hefty piece of machinery, capable of handling dozens of paper ICC profiles and detecting the weight of the paper.
In most cases, we will probably need to feed it manually, sheet by sheet, unless a roll of the specific paper we want to use exists. While this might be cumbersome, the image quality more than makes up for the extra effort. There is still a lot of calibration to be done, but the wonderful thing is that we’ll be able to produce even more in-house with our own printing capabilities.
When HAL arrived, we were so excited that we simply threw together some of our old artwork and set it to print. Even with the basic setting of just uploading the paper’s ICC profile to the printer, the result was beyond amazing. The blacks are truly black, and the colours are incredibly vibrant. It’s like seeing all that old artwork in a completely new light.
I can’t wait for us to put it to good use. It’s been a long time coming, and it’s yet another crown jewel in our production—one of many more to come!
