Reviews and price comparisons of Hewlett-Packard HP DesignJet Z3100

It is ironic that most of the information on the new printers, prior to the official release, is on the HP website, and in other things such as the PhotoPlus news release. Thus I don’t see why they required editors to not mention it when their own web sites and their own PR agencies were already releasing it, seemingly for weeks.

Anyway, we still honor our own NDA, and will not release any of the details until the official day (26 September). So we will talk about only the aspects already mentioned on over 3,000 web sites elsewhere, namely there are four printers

8-color 24” HP Designjet Z2100
8-color 44” HP Designjet Z2100

12-color 24” Designjet HPZ3100
12-color 44” Designjet HPZ3100

This news must be catastrophic for anyone currently trying to hold a job at Epson, and must be a serious headache for Canon. Canon had the jump on 12-color printers with their iPF5000, but the iPF9000 took too long, and the iPF6000 and iPF8000 took even longer.

Hewlett-Packard HP DesignJet Z3100

The price comparisons will be interesting since the “cost” is higher on the HP but that’s because it offers more features. The previous HP 5000 and 5500 turned out to be the most robust water-based inkjet printer ever made. The HP 5000-5500 set a record for the longest lasting and most successful printer of the decade.

The HP Designjet Z2100 and Z3100 will set comparable records for giclee, fine art photography, and digital photography.

Nicholas with prints from the HP Designjet Z3100 Photo printer, doing samples at Barcelona, Spain demo center (training center for the Z3100 printer). The heliconia flower photographs by Nicholas are are shot with a Phase One P 30 courtesy of Global Imaging Inc.

Nicholas Hellmuth continues to inspect the HP Designjet Z3100 photo printer wherever he is; here in Vancouver, BC, Canada, in the showroom of Phoenix Media Direct, Inc.

One of the 270,000+ readers of this FLAAR web site, artist Noel Hodnett, visits showroom to compare and contrast the Canon iPF5000 and HP Designjet Z3100. Two days before, Noel has written FLAAR to ask for assistance in figuring out which of these two printers to buy: Canon iPF8000 or HP Designjet Z3100. He was greatly surprised when he found out that Nicholas was in Vancouver, consulting the start-up of a large giclee atelier elsewhere in the city. So Dr Hellmuth went with Noel and did a comparative evaluation, in person, on the two printers.

First posted Sept. 26, 2006.