Fairfield, NJ – Buyers Laboratory LLC (BLI), the world’s leading authority on document imaging hardware, software and services, today announced the winners of its prestigious Pick awards in the Wide Format Printer categories. Canon products earned two individual Pick awards, and the company also took home the coveted 2017 Wide Format Printer Line of the Year award recognizing the overall excellence of its entire wide format portfolio:
CANON INC.
Wide Format Line of the Year
imagePROGRAF PRO-2000/PRO-4000 Series
Outstanding Professional Photo and Fine Art Wide-Format Printer Series
imagePROGRAF PRO-4000S/PRO-6000S Series
Outstanding Poster and Indoor Signage Wide-Format Printer Series
BLI’s coveted Line of the Year designation is awarded once a year to the vendors whose product lines are determined to be the best overall in their respective categories based on the cumulative test results in BLI’s testing. Also considered are the breadth of the manufacturer’s portfolio in the category and its ability to produce quality products suitable to a broad spectrum of customer needs.
“The comprehensiveness of Canon’s offerings, satisfying the production/proofing print markets with the 8-color models and the high-end graphics markets with the 12-color models across all the common size ranges, together with the outstanding lab performance of all the models tested have earned Canon the 2017 Line of the Year award for its wide format graphic arts and technical printers,” explained Marlene Orr, Director, Office Equipment Product Analysis at BLI. “As proof of their quality, every Canon wide-format model tested in the past year has earned BLI’s Highly Recommended rating.”
Bestowed once a year, the individual Pick awards recognize the products that are the best in their respective classes based on the results of BLI’s rigorous two-month laboratory evaluation. Among the many factors considered by BLI analysts and technicians when considering a possible award winners are reliability, image quality, ease of use, color management, productivity and connectivity attributes. Building on the success of multiple Pick wins over the last few years for the technical printers tested by BLI, such as the iPF830/840/850 series with their class-leading productivity and excellent CAD/GIS graphics for AEC professionals, Canon continues to impress with its top-notch imagePROGRAF line of wide format devices. Canon has now raised the bar again with a new generation of Graphic Arts (GA) models, designed to meet the challenging needs of indoor signage for professional photographers and fine art studios alike. This year, four models from Canon—the 12-color PRO-2000/PRO-4000 and the 8-color PRO-4000S/PRO-6000S—were selected by BLI analysts and technicians as 2017 Picks in their respective categories for their outstanding performance.
“Whether printing a single page, multi-page or a batch of files of different formats in quick succession, the imagePROGRAF models all deliver fast speeds and excellent performance,” said David Sweetnam, BLI’s director of research and lab services EMEA/Asia. “More importantly, image quality was outstanding for graphics and photographs, with bright, saturated colors and natural-looking skin tones.”
“We are very proud that our new models have been recognized for their outstanding performance and reliability,” said Yuichi Miyano, business group director of Canon Europe’s Wide Format Group. “The details of the reports from BLI are very important to us as they show where Canon is achieving its goals and also where we can make further improvements. It is a sign of our commitment that these devices have won BLI Pick awards and we will continue with our innovation and investment to make sure we continue this success.”
About Buyers Laboratory LLC
Buyers Laboratory LLC (BLI) is the world’s leading independent provider of analytical information and services to the digital imaging and document management industry. For over 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 US and UK 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, 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.
