Canon Pixma iP2600 Photo Printer

The Pixma iP2600 is Canon's inkjet photo printer for users on a budget. The retail price is $49.99, replacing the Pixma iP1800 as its entry-level, straightforward printer with limited features. As expected in a baseline product, the iP2600 lacks a PictBridge port and a memory card slot but makes up for it with a sleek design, competitive print speeds, and bold, crisp prints. The photos themselves are also incredibly easy to crop, repair, and alter using the included Easy-PhotoPrint EX software bundle. Overall, you'll find that this is a cost-effective printer for text documents and amateur-level photo printing.

Design
It's obvious that Canon put a lot of work into the design of the iP2600. The sleek exterior is 5.6x17.4x10 inches and has a glossy black, slightly mirrored finish that looks sleek on your desk--that is, until the dust settles, literally. The shiny body retains fingerprints, a lot like the display on the iPhone. Smudges aside, the iP2600 doesn't take up a lot of desk space, and it blended in nicely with the rest of our dark peripherals. The output and paper trays both fold into the unit when not in use, creating a tight box that could easily be mistaken for a stereo boom box. The output tray folds down from the face of the printer with a slightly flimsy rectangular arm that extends to corral loose paper. The arm doesn't have a cap at the end, which was counterproductive, and a few of our test sheets flew off the tray as a result. Annoying, but certainly not a deal-breaker.

The control panel is very minimalist, with only power and paper feed buttons on top of the printer. The power button also doubles as an alarm lamp that flashes orange when an error occurs. The power cord and the USB port are on the back. Potential buyers should be aware that you'll need a USB cord to connect the printer to a computer, but as is frustratingly common with printers, it's not included in the box. Appropriate for this price, there are no provisions for external bridge connectivity, so consumers looking to eliminate the middleman and plug a digital camera, a USB key, or a memory card directly into the IP2600 should look to a comparable, more fully featured (albeit higher priced) set like the HP Deskjet D4260 or the Epson Stylus Photo R260.

Performance
The Canon Pixma iP2600 performed admirably in our speed tests. The Pixma churned out 5.68 pages per minute (ppm) of black-and-white text, falling just short of the HP Deskjet 4260 ($75) at 6.03 ppm and the Lexmark Z845 ($50) at 6.85 ppm. The three printers are all within the same general sub-$100 price range, so the slight deficit is expected and acceptable compared with other budget inkjet printers.

Print speeds (in pages per minute)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

PPM (photo)

PPM (text)

Lexmark Z845

0.48 

6.85 

HP Deskjet D5260

1.01 

6.03 

Canon Pixma iP2600

0.89 

5.68 

The Canon also performed surprisingly well in our quality tests. It printed text onto 20-pound generic office paper with dense, well-saturated ink. The characters formed precise, crisp edges with no visible blurriness and minimal misshapes in 8x loupe magnification. The color graphics test came out solid and evenly distributed, but there were certain portions of our graphics document that came out with a slightly neutral color, specifically in areas with gradual color gradients. We repeated our tests in three iterations, and these imperfections were consistent but will likely be unnoticeable unless you have a sharp eye for print quality. In all cases, the photos produced vivid colors and text that popped from the page. Most importantly, we found these results to be accurate over the cartridges' entire life cycle.

We were also impressed with the 4x6 photos we printed on Canon's semigloss paper. They're definitely far from perfect, but the colors were balanced evenly and our subjects' faces appeared to contain an even amount of cyan and magenta, a task that's difficult for most lower-end photo printers to achieve. The solid printing performance and relatively quick output speeds make this printer an affordable choice for printing text, light graphics documents, and digital pictures.

Service and support
Canon ensures support for the iP2600 for a limited 90 days after the purchase date, a meager amount compared with Epson's guaranteed one-year warranty. However, if you do encounter an issue that can't be solved over the phone, you'll still be protected by Canon's "InstaExchange" service: a new printer will be sent out with instructions inside on how to use the RMA number to send your defective unit back to Canon. The highlight of this service is that your new printer will be shipped out the same day, as long as you call in before 3 p.m. ET Monday through Friday.

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