Most inkjet printers use dye-based inks. But dyes are subject to fading. They dye a coating on the paper. While Canon OEM inks are designed to resist fading, that only works if the paper is also resistant to fading and glossy papers are not good at this. A cotton/rag (these papers generally always have a matte finish) archival quality paper would work. The PRO-100 is a dye-based inkjet.
Pigment-based inks contain ... pigments. Instead of applying a dye to the coating on the paper, the pigment covers the paper (more like paint). Pigments are highly resistant to fading and you'll find Canon's very high-end printers are all pigment printers. Pigment printers are generally the preferred choice when you want "archival" quality prints that still look great years from now because they resist fading (again, paper should also be archival quality / acid-free). But you can get glossy papers that work as well as matte papers. The PRO-10 is a pigment printer.
Printers have a narrower color gamut (the number of possible colors it can reproduce) than what you can see on a computer monitor. Adding more tanks increases the color gamut. When you see printers that use more tanks, that means they can produce more colors accurately.
Both the PRO-10 and PRO-100 will run a maintenance cycle to prevent the print-heads from clogging even when you are not using the printers. Every inkjet will clog *if* it is allowed to sit unused for long periods.
Canon's printers have a built-in maintenance cycle to prevent this. When the printer is unused, the printhead parks on a seal to prevent it from drying out. But since no seal is perfect it will periodically move over to spray out a very tiny amount of ink onto a waste pad. The pigment printer does this once every 60 hours. The dye printer does this once every 120 hours. BUT... this will ONLY happen if you leave the printer powered on (continuously). It is strongly recommended that you leave it on ... never turn it off even if you don't use it for months on end.
If you power off the printer, then the internal clock that handles the maintenance obviously isn't keeping track of time. As a result, the printer has no idea how long it has been sitting unused and it forces a deeper maintenance cycle to compensate (so it actually wastes less ink if you just leave it on all the time.)
The maintenance cycles don't use much ink (at least not in my opinion). There are certain tanks in my printer that almost never get used so I watch their ink levels over time to judge how much ink is used by the maintenance cycles. It occurs to me that the tanks would probably last about a year before they need to be replaced (and you really don't want ink to get too old anyway).
Tim Campbell
5D III, 5D IV, 60Da
