Printing

The printer has two Media feed slots, the rear tray which is located on the top surface accommodates media sizes from A5 through to A2 or photo paper sizes from 4x6" through to 17x22"  including Letter, Legal Letter and LDR. The tray handles media from 64 -105g/m2 and Canon speciality paper max 300g/m2. The media is held in place by an adjustable guide which is robust, smooth running and holds the media securely in place.

To the rear is a sturdy fold out three section media support. A small cover protects the printer from any foreign objects falling into the works and also protects against dust. I thought this was an unnecessary feature, on several occasions once  paper had been loaded the printer would fail to print if the cover was not closed. A warning message is displayed on the front operation panel telling you to close the top cover.

A single sheet Manual feeder is located at the back of the printer, paper guides ensure the media will not slip sideways, these do not appear to be as robust as the rear feed guides, but are sufficient for single sheets of media. Speciality media up to 400g/m2 with a thickness between 0.1-0.7mm can be loaded here. A four section paper support supports the media. Disappointingly there is no straight media path for thicker board printing or roll holder for printing long custom size photos.

Located at the rear of the printer is the maintenance cartridge, this absorbs inks which may be used during print head nozzle cleaning, or when printing borderless prints. The USB, Ethernet and power supply ports are also located at the rear.

Test Prints

We used a variety of papers for our test, from Photo glossy through to matte Fine Art media, the resulting prints are very impressive. Our A4 test print using Canon Photo Paper Pro PR101 took 2min 30sec using the High setting in the printer properties, not the fastest printer we have tested. The quality of reproduced colours is excellent and certainly worth the extra printing time. We also printed the same test image using the Highest Quality setting in the printer properties, this took 3min 50sec and didn't display any noticeable difference in print quality.

Looking at the test print in detail, the baby portrait has a healthy skin tone, just a touch on the warm side but this can be flattering for portraiture. The cotton reels display vibrant colours throughout as well as a rich solid black, the white reel has kept all the detail in the threads. The solid colour patches produced clean accurate colours, although the Blue does have a slight tinge of violet. The gradients are smooth with no visible banding from paper white to solid colour, this is due to the small 4pl ink droplet size and a 600dpi x2 nozzle pitch. The Greyscale steps are totally neutral with no visible colour cast, each step is clearly defined. The B/W image has maintained excellent detail in the deep shadow areas and yet kept sufficient detail in the highlight areas. The 10 point text printing and fine line pattern element shows that this printer can produce crisp characters. We would not recommend using this printer as a workhorse for newsletter or document printing, just due to the high cost of inks etc.

Canon have produced an exceptionally good set of profiles for this printer, this is a remarkable achievement given that it uses 12 inks. Interestingly, we tried two methods of applying profiles, Printer manages colours, and Photoshop manages colours. The printer manages colours option produced better looking colours than the dedicated profile for the media in use. I should point out, that as a photographer you may need to tweak colours in your image editing application depending on how you want the final result to look. Many photographers make the mistake of relying too much on canned or custom profiles to achieve a perfect result. Yet they wouldn't rely on Auto metering on a camera, think of profiles as the auto setting on a printer and adjust accordingly.

We produced several A2 size prints, these took a respectable 7min 10sec to reproduce. The print quality on all our prints was outstanding, particularly impressive was the B/W (monochrome) prints. In quality terms these prints surpass anything that I could ever achieve in a darkroom using traditional wet chemistry.

As mentioned earlier, the ink tanks that are supplied with the printer are not full capacity, although we didn't run the printer dry but after 14 A2 and 10 A4 prints we got the warning that the Chroma Optimizer ink needed to be replaced. The Chroma Optimiser ink provides a uniform gloss over glossy media, gives the appearance of deeper blacks and prevents unwanted bronzing in prints.

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