Canon PIXMA iP5000 review

Verdict:

The iP5000 looks great and strikes a good balance between plain paper and photo requirements. It's expensive, though, and despite its high specification its photo prints are not as good as those of a six-ink system.

Review Date: 20 Oct 2004

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Unlike the other Canon printers in this test, the iP5000 makes a convincing attempt at a designer look. With all the paper guides closed it's a simple silver and black glossy box that looks great on its own or next to a standard black PC case.

Like the other Pixma printers the iP5000 has two 150-sheet paper trays, but it also supports duplex printing and can print to CD-Rs. It has no memory card support, but it does have a PictBridge USB port on its front panel.

The iP5000 uses Canon's ContrastPLUS five-ink system with two black inks: one pigment-based for text and one dye-based for photo output. This means it uses only four inks for photo printing, but tiny 1-picolitre droplets minimise grain. Although it isn't quite up to the standard of the best six-ink printers, the iP5000's photo quality was amazingly good for a four-ink system. Prints were particularly sharp and didn't suffer from the exaggerated contrast we saw in some HP prints, although colours were very over-saturated at the driver's default settings.

Plain paper output is crisp at all quality settings, even draft, and it appears quickly. The Photosmart 8150, when fitted with an optional black cartridge, was the only printer to beat the iP5000's 12.9 pages per minute in our 50-page document test. The iP5000 was the fastest printer in this group when printing our mixed colour test, delivering 24 graphics-heavy pages in just 10 minutes.

Although one of the iP5000's strengths is its advanced paper handling, we were disappointed by its duplex printing, which was slow and of lower quality than simplex prints at the same settings.

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