Canon CLC-1180 Copier and Printer Review

The company recently decided it needed a high-quality, high-volume printer. And by quality, we mean the kind of quality that you normally have to go to a specialty print house to get. I wanted that quality in house. We send out a lot of reviewer guides, a lot of screenshots, and a lot of other marketing material. But mostly we just wanted to have a top of the line printer in terms of quality (inkjet quality on photos) but could do it on plain paper and at a reasonable speed. Turns out, you can get that printer if you're willing to pay enough.

The result of having huge scope and in-house means big money.  And it came in the form of the Canon CLC 1180.  With the options I have installed on it, it's rated at around $30,000.  Of course, no one actually pays the list price. At that point, you're buying a car and you can negotiate the price. I negotiated the price down to about half that but one would expect to normally pay around $20,000 probably for this configuration.

So what do you get for tens of thousands of dollars in a printer?  Well, the first part is that it's not technically a printer. It's a "copier" that happens to print. It is a pretty good color copier. In fact, it's the best color copier I've ever encountered. It also has a stapler on it. So if you have a 100 8 page reports to make, you can tell it to staple the reports as well as collate them. And it has a scanner with a TWAIN driver so that you can scan images to your computer from it (though bear in mind that involves walking all the way to the thing to switch pieces of paper).

So how is the quality? Well... It's by far the best quality I've ever seen on plain paper. Better than inket or anything else.  But is it $10,000 better? No, not really. But that's the problem, if you want to get above say the Xerox Phaser 6300 level, you're going to pay some bucks. A lot of bucks. You're way at the outter edge at that point and most people just don't need that kind of quality.  But it really does deliver.

In my recent review of the Xerox 6300DN, I pointed out that it beats the Xerox 8400/8500 series in quality.  But the Canon CLC 1180 creams both Xerox's in quality:

Canon CLC 1180

Xerox 6300DN

Even these scans don't do it justice. The Canon looks like a photo -- on plain paper. It's that good. The Xerox looks like a good laser print out.  Our art department loves the Canon because it is perfect at color matching. I mean perfect. There's no futzing with settings when you print, it simply nails the colors right every time.

So let's say you have $20,000 to spend. Should you get this? That's hard to say. One of the first things we've learned is that a printer like this is not like anything we've had before. You have to have maintenance on it. And it's expensive. On top of the rather large price point, maintenance costs $.11 per page (on a color print). That includes toner and everything else other than actual paper. But it's still pricey, especially when it screws up a job -- which it does...often. 

For example, I write a lengthy Christmas letter each year to people we know. It goes out to around 100 people. It includes lots of pictures.  Last year I did it with the Phaser 8400 and it did fine. Just sent the job to the printer, came back the next day and it was done. (well I did it in blocks of 50 to be fair).  Now, with my mega-expensive Canon CLC 1180, it was its time to shine. Its opportunity to demonstrate its premium price.  It was not a happy day. 

This year's letter was 11 pages and I needed about 100 of them.  The first thing I discovered is how archaic and stupid the RIP (basically a PC running Windows NT 4.0 that sits on the printer) is.  My letter has a ton of high resolution photos in it. I printed it from Word. Any modern printer would have no problem handling that. It would rescale the images to the output size on the fly. But not so the Canon CLC 1180. It took my 180 megabyte document into the RIP and expanded it into monster (god knows how many gigabytes it must have expanded these 5mega pixel pictures to) sizes. Suffice to say that a day later, not a single page had been printed.  So instead used Word's option of manually rescaling the images to print size and then exporting it as a PDF.  Then the printer worked fine. So now it was a snap right? Wrong.

I decided to use the stapler option.  So the stapler sorter jammed on the 10th print out. Jammed bad enough that we needed the Canon support people to come out. I will say that Canon support is phenomenal (so is Xerox's too). They were in next morning and fixed that.  So then I got going again and I quickly discover that I can only print 20 of these at a time with the stapler option. After that, the copies have to be removed before it will continue. No fire and forget there. Not that it mattered because it jammed three separate times while printing. It also crashed once.  In all, it took me over 3 days to print my 100 letters off on it compared to a single day last year on the Phaser 8400 (the Phaser 6300DN would have handled it all in a couple hours).  So it was not a triumph for the Canon CLC 1180 in what should be its area of expertise.

Now maybe my particular Canon CLC 1180 has issues. But I don't think so. The Canon support guys have replaced huge chunks of it already (I want to mention again - Canon's support team rocks. Without their incredible service, my opinion of Canon - and Stardock is a Canon shop on virtually everything other than the two Xerox printers we have -- would have dropped considerably).  The problem is that once you get to these kinds of printers, you're dealing with a machine that is as complicated as something out of a Dr. Sues novel. Just watching it run makes me think of some ridiculously over engineered machine in a cartoon. The number of moving parts in this thing is obscene.  The amount of work the thing has to do in order to do duplex when compared to the Xerox's really speaks volumes for the archaic engineering in this thing.

Which brings me to my main gripe with the Canon CLC 1180. It is archaic. It is basically an upgrade to a printer technology that is from the 1990s. The software it comes with is archaic. The usability of the front panel is archaic.  For example, the RIP has lots of space on it. The printer is a copier. So, why can't I, from the copier, tell it to copy something and save it to the RIP and then let me connect to the RIP like I would to a USB memory card?  The tools for it, and there are quite a bit, remind me of stuff written by IBM for OS/2. And I don't mean that in a nice way. My other Canon printers, which tend to cost less than $500 (the injkets) have wonderful software products that come with them. Yet this $20,000+ printer has tools that require me to look up that the device I want is known as "1100".

So if it sounds like I don't like this printer, that is not the impression I mean to leave with you. I think a better way to describe it is that I'm disappointed with the printer. It's not nearly as reliable as it should be, it does not provide nearly enough value for its cost. But it does deliver on the quality and performance and thus meets our specifications. It's just not a very good value for those specifications. I also had no idea of the level of maintenance a machine like this requires. My car requires less maintenance than the printer. And it's not a faulty printer, it's just apparently the nature of these super high end printers. And there are still printers way beyond this but whose quality is only marginally better.

Overall, I'm glad I got the printer. My complaints aside, we needed a printer that could deliver on normal paper very very high quality at a reasonable speed. And it does that. I am not even aware of an alternative to it. Simply put, as far as I know, if you want this kind of quality, this is pretty much your best option. Luckily for most people, this kind of quality isn't necessary or if it is, it's not a common enough situation to justify buying a printer like this. Most people would just go to a Kinkos or printhouse where they have their own Canon CLC that they'll charge you a buck per copy for.