Canon’s L Lens Red Ring Spreads to Printers with the imagePROGRAF PRO-1000

The “L” in Canon’s L-series lenses stands for “luxury,” and the professional-grade lenses can be easily recognized by the distinctive red ring found near the end of the barrel. Canon is now expanding that red ring to the world of high-end photo printers.

Today, the company announced the new imagePROGRAF PRO-1000, a 17-inch professional fine art inkjet printer that features a red line across its body to indicate the quality of the prints you’ll get with it.

Canon says the PRO-1000 is the first in a new series of imagePROGRAF that will echo the same red line as Canon’s EF L-Series lenses.

“This feature-rich professional printer complements Canon’s professional line of DSLR cameras and lenses for an ideal pairing that can produce high-detail, high-quality images when printed on a variety of media, creating images that look as accurate printed as when they were captured,” the company writes.

The imagePROGRAF PRO-1000 improves upon the features and specs of the $1,000 Canon PIXMA PRO-1. It has a new print head that’s 50% larger, increasing the number of nozzles from 12,288 to 18,432. The larger head also prints faster: a 13×19″ print takes just 2 min, 30 sec instead of 4 min, 20 sec.

Canon is also launching a new ink system called the LUCIA PRO — the 11-color (plus the Chroma Optimizer) system uses an optimized resin coating for denser ink droplets, which increases color gamut by up to 19% compared to the PIXMA PRO-1. Other features of the ink system include denser blacks, dedicated nozzles for Photo Black and Matte Black, and 80ml ink tank sizes for less hassle.

Finally, Canon says the new printer also has a new software solution (Print Studio Pro v 2.0) and a new processing engine (L-COA PRO) for a better print creation workflow and better print results.

Here are a couple of videos Canon released today to announce the new printer:

The Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1000 will hit stores at the end of October 2015 with a price tag of $1,300. Each color ink costs $60 and the Chroma Optimizer costs $55, so a full set of cartridges will cost you around $715.