New Camera Rental Shop Found

Steve Parker forwarded me a new rental shop for Canon and Nikon gear. The usual shops like Rentglass.com and CamRents.com are notoriously swamped and always out of gear, so anytime another rental house comes around, it’s a good thing to know.

I checked their web site today and notice that they claim to have most of the Nikon lenses I was snooping on hand and in stock, ready to be rented. And they seem to have comparable rates. Definitely worth checking out before laying down our hard earned cash for a lens that we’re not sure will fit our shooting styles.

Here’s their link: Borrowlenses.com.

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Canon Pixma Pro9000 Review

A few months ago, I was fortunate to grab a Canon Pixma Pro9000 at an unbeatable deal. What follows below are my experiences with my new found printer over these past few months.

Color Reproduction

One thing I always do before printing is to use (read: convert-to) the Canon ICC profiles to get accurate colors from my files. Once I did that, my color prints are spot on to what I see on my screen. Also, remember to turn off color correction in the printer dialog box! And let Photoshop operate the color management.

Speed/Performance

So far as speed, I can print a 13×19 print in about 1.5 minutes and that blew away the performance of my dated Epson 2000p. Plus, since I don’t regularly make prints, I’ve noticed no clogging of the print heads in between prints, over a time span of 4-5 weeks. My old Epson would have to cycle through the cleaning of the heads (of course after making a bad print to realize the heads needed cleaning, I remember that I needed to clean the heads) for 5-8 cycles, wasting a ton of ink, between print times like this.

Driver Support on my Macintosh

The Canon drivers have given me no problems on OS X (so far, and AFTER I figured out that, just like when printing to any printer, I needed to convert my working colors to the Canon’s ICC profile) and I get many more options from the print dialog within Photoshop than I ever got with the Epson. In my experience with my old Epson 2000p, it seemed like Epson didn’t really write a native driver for the Macintosh, but rather they did a minimalist attempt at providing a driver for the Mac. I’ve had numerous problems with my 2000p, to the point that I’ve taken it down to an uncle’s digital darkroom, hooked it up to his PC-based systems and have gotten better results with it than I ever got with it being attached to my Mac-based darkroom.

Paper Experiences

Regarding print papers, I’ve pretty much stuck to the Canon super-glossy photo paper, so far. I did buy some matte paper from Canon and my prints on that paper appear to be OK, but I’ve not scrutinized them as deeply as I have the glossy. Plus, the matte prints are 8×10 and smaller right now. It’s so sweet to pick up a 13×19 glossy print and gaze/scrutinize it as opposed to the smaller, matte-based prints I’ve done to date. More testing is needed here though, on my part.

Bottom Line

Overall, I’m quite happy with my Pro9000 printer. I felt Canon really released a driver that at least implements everything as you’d find on the PC printer drivers. Not like my Epson 2000p driver’s set of limited features. (This really was a sore point for me, when I took my 2000p to my Uncle’s darkroom and discovered all these other features were in the PC driver. And those were needed features on my Mac to fix some of the problems I was having with that printer.)

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