Canon Pixma iP2600 review

Canon's tiny Pixma iP2600 manages to avoid the technical pitfalls usually associated with budget inkjets.

It's sturdy and well designed, without any of the paper-feeding difficulties that we've previously encountered with some of Canon's cheapest models. Its top paper tray can hold up to 100 sheets of A4, and a flap at the front of the printer conceals an output tray that can be folded down and outwards. The whole printer takes up remarkably little space, occupying an area of just 442x253mm with its trays folded away.

The iP2600 is a four-colour inkjet and comes with two standard-sized cartridges capable of printing up to 215 pages of mono and 206 pages of colour, or 79 6x4in photos. The photo-printing process uses a composite black made up of the cyan, magenta and yellow inks in the colour cartridge; black ink is used for printing only on plain paper. High-yield PG-40 black and CL-41 colour cartridges are also available, which produce up to 327 black and 303 colour pages respectively. Although this is more economical than buying standard cartridges, print costs are still among the most expensive around. A combined A4 page of black and colour printing will cost around 7.5p, compared to 4p per page for Canon's Pixma iP4500 or 5.5p per page for Lexmark's Z1320.

However, the iP2600's print quality far exceeds that of the Lexmark, and comes close to rivalling that of Canon's more expensive printers. Even draft-quality text looked good enough to use for almost any purpose and was only slightly lighter than the dark, solid characters produced at normal quality. Print speeds didn't differ much between the two modes, with draft text emerging only 0.6ppm faster.

Colour documents were rather slow to print but were very accurate, with rich colours and few flaws visible in our test images. Some of the text in the same documents looked rather fuzzy and had a slight coloured halo around it, though. Photos were the best we've seen from such a low-cost printer, with vivid colours and a smooth, glossy finish. Flesh tones were accurate and details were faithfully reproduced, while print speeds were surprisingly fast.

We found very little to fault in this printer's quality but, like most budget inkjets, it's expensive to run. The iP2600 is similar to the Canon Pixma iP1800 (reviewed in Shopper 238), but the new model is better designed and built. It has a proper output tray, and it is easy to load paper. The PIXMA iP2600 is an excellent choice if you want a compact printer for infrequent use, but if you do a lot of printing the money you save on its purchase price will soon be outweighed by its high print costs.