Canon Pixma IP2600

 

 

 
As fast as the Canon iP2600 was, we thought it might be able to compete against color laser printers, but it fell quite below when compared to the HP Color Laserjet 3600n, which printed 17 pages per minute. 

The Canon iP2600 continued good performance in to photo printing. Although it wasn't our fastest tested printer, it did average second. The iP2600 did a noticeably good job of printing large file 4x6inch prints. While the compared printers came in under half a page per minute, the iP2600 was able to push out nearly two prints. 

The Canon iP2600 was beat out by HP’s D7460 when printing small file 4x6 prints, small file 8.5x11inch prints and large file 8.5x11inch prints by a good margin. Even said, comparably it produced overall faster prints than the Canon iP1800 and Epson R2400, whose scores were quite disappointing. 

While many printers like the Canon iP2600 are capable of printing from memory cards, compact flash cards and other media cards and USB, the iP2600 doesn’t contain any supportable ports. Although it didn’t lose any points for this, we were only able to test the printer speeds based on PC prints.

Photo Print Speeds in Pages per Minute
	4x6		8.5 x 11		13 x 19
	sml	lge	sml	lge	sml	lge
Canon Pixma iP2600	2.57	1.96	1.12	0.65	n /a	n/a
Canon Pixma iP1800	0.32	0.34	0.20	0.20	n/a	n/a
HP Photosmart D7460	2.81	1.39	1.79	1.02	n/a	n/a
Epson Stylus Photo R2400	0.38	0.38	0.19	0.19	0.09	0.04

Testing color accuracy is an integral part in our printer testing because it shows how well a printer can reproduce the little things like the color of the sky, green grass or the color of your skin. To test the accuracy of a printer, we have the printer print a representation of a standard color chart (see chart below) and measure how close the printer can get using an Eye-One Pro spectrophotometer. Using a software called Imatest Pro, we test the printer’s printed chart with the Colorcheck option. The results tell us how close the printer’s version of the chart got to the original.

The Canon iP2600 did exceptionally poor on our color accuracy test. It was only able to hit one color accurately on the head and that was light skin. In fact, in our efforts to improve the score by making a custom profile using a software called Eye-One Match 3, which queue’s the printer to print a color chart and attempts to decipher the differences in color between what the printer printed and what the original looks like. It then creates a custom profile specifically for the printer so the printer can more accurately represent colors. Below is the results chart for the Canon iP2600.  The farther away the circles and squares are, or the longer the line, the farther the printer was from matching the color.  You'll notice that the iP2600 was able to match box two, or 'light skin' the best. 

Most of the time, producing a custom profile emits improved scores in color accuracy, but oddly for the iP2600, it went the opposite way. The iP2600 produced the best color accuracy using its default profile on Canon photo paper, though nothing to be proud of, as at its best it still was poor. 

The Color Gamut test looks at how much of the standard Adobe RGB color space a printer can accurately reproduce. Printers that can render more of the Adobe RGB color space will ultimately output images with a greater range of colors and look more attractive to the eye. On the graph below, the solid color is the color space that the printer can cover, while the grid represents the entire Adobe RGB color space. The closer the two, the more colors the printer can represent and the higher the score.

Being able to cover 50% of the color space is considered acknowledgeable; a good performer. Being able to reproduce 70% is considered excellent. So you can get a better idea of how the Canon iP2600 did, I’ll show you how its competitors faired first.  Epson R2400 reproduced a very generous 66% of the color space, the Canon iP1800 55% and the HP D7460 43.45%. 

The Canon iP12600 was able to reproduce 32.07% of the color space, which was even more disappointing to see since the Canon iP1800 did such a good job in this test. 

The DMax test is a measurement of the densest black that the printer can produce. We measure this using a densitometer; we use the EyeOne Pro spectrophotometer from Gretag Macbeth. The ideal value of a printer is 2.50, although reaching this score is nearly impossible, getting close is valued highly, as it means that the printer will produce deep, dark blacks.

The Canon iP2600 came back with a shocking return with its DMax value; it beat out its three competitors easily. With a score of 2.4, it beat out Epson R2400’s 2.26, HP D7460’s 2.04 and Canon iP1800’s very low score of 1.78. 

Creating the right black and white photograph took a lot of work on the user’s end (me). At the default level where the photograph is untouched by the software and printer driver, the black and white print comes out blotchy, with a slight shade of purple and just very gothic looking (left image below).

            

It took many prints at several different settings to figure out what combination produced a good black and white photograph (right image above). And it turns out, the best black and white the Canon iP2600 produced was edited only by the printer driver – when the grayscale, high quality, and the correct photo paper were selected.