Canon Pixma iP2600 – Reasonable and Impressive Photo Printer

Pros

The Canon Pixma iP2600 Photo Printer’s portrait print offers precise and even colors. The printer has a smooth design, which folds up to give modest storage space, text print here offers sharp lines and considering the print quality, the printer is reasonably priced.

Cons

The Canon Pixma iP2600 Photo Printer does not have a memory card slot and PictBridge port, on top of it the printer’s external body is a fingerprint magnet, the USB cord is not included here and the bright colors from the printer had a little gray cast.

Introduction

The Canon Pixma iP2600 is the photo printer for the budget consumers in market. The Pixma iP2600 is priced at $49.99 in retail stores and replaces Canon’s Pixma iP1800 as an entry-level printer with limited features. The Pixma iP2600 comes with all that’s expected of a baseline product and like any other basic printer the Pixma iP2600 also does not have a memory card slot and a PictBridge port, but the sleek design, bold and crunchy prints and competitive print speeds of the printer makes up for it.

The photos for printing here can be easily cropped, altered and repaired with the help of the built-in Easy-PhotoPrint EX software bundle of Canon Pixma iP2600. On the whole, you’ll find that the Canon Pixma iP2600 is a gainful printer, especially if you are using it for amateur photo printing or for text documents. So we will recommend Canon Pixma iP2600 only to those consumers who are looking for a printer to print their personal photos and test documents.

Design

The design of Pixma iP2600 is a clear proof that a lot of effort has been done in designing it. The sleek external body of Pixma iP2600 measures 5.6 x 17.4 x 10 inches and has a lustrous black and somewhat mirrored appearance.  This looks stylish on any desk, but doesn’t last long as the lustrous external body of the printer acts as a powerful dust and fingerprint magnet. But if that’s not a problem for you then the iP2600 is a nice machine to have on your desk, as it does not takes a lot of space and blends well with the aesthetics of the room. Both the paper trays for the printer folds into the printer while not in use, and gives tight stereo boom box look to what actually is a printer.

The Pixma iP2600’s control panel is limited controls and the only controls that it has are of paper feed and power buttons. The control panel is positioned on top of the printer. The power button also serves as an alarm, and flashes orange whenever an error takes place. The rear end of Pixma iP2600 hosts the USB Port and Power Cord. So if you are considering Pixma iP2600 as your next printer then keep in mind that you’ll need a USB cord for connecting the printer to a computer. There also is no provision for external bridge connectivity, so if you are thinking of connecting a digital camera, a memory card or a USB key straight into the Pixma iP2600 would have to look further for a more potent fully featured printer such as the Epson Stylus Photo R260 or HP DeskJet D4260.

System Configuration

Starting price: $49.22
Manufacturer: Canon USA
Part Number: 2435B002
Printer Type: Photo printer, Ink-jet Color
Operating System Supported: Microsoft Windows 2000,   Microsoft Windows XP,   and Apple MacOS X 10.3.9 or later and Microsoft Windows Vista

Dimensions (W x D x H): 17.4 x 10 x 5.6 in
System weight: 8.2 lbs
Inkjet Technology: Canon FINE (Full-lithography inkjet Nozzle Engineering)
Media Type Supported: Envelopes,   Cards,   Plain paper,   Photo paper,   Glossy photo paper,   Matte photo paper,   Two-sided photo paper,   High resolution paper and Semi-gloss photo paper
Software Included: Drivers & Utilities and Canon Easy-PhotoPrint
Ink Palette (Colors): 4-ink
Connectivity Technology: Wired

Performance

The Canon Pixma iP2600 delivered admirable performance in our lab speed tests. The Pixma iP2600 printed an imposing 5.68 pages per minute of black-and-white text in our text printing speed, and came after HP DeskJet 4260 which is priced at $75 and prints 6.03 pages per minute and Lexmark Z845 priced at $50 and prints at 6.85 pages per minute. All the three printers here are sub-$100 printers so there hardly will any shortfall in actual operating conditions in comparison to other budget inkjet printers.

Even the print quality offered by Pixma iP2600 pretty impressive, and the printer delivered sharp prints with dense and uniform ink distribution. Even the color prints in our document printing test were pretty imposing and were evenly distributed. And even though the photos printed on Pixma iP2600 may have been far from perfect, but were satisfactory with balanced and even color distribution. So the imposing print speed and respectable print quality offered by the printer makes it an affordable and considerable option for the people looking for an option to print decent quality text, digital pictures and light graphics documents.

Support

The Canon iP2600 comes with a limited 90 day warranty, which in comparison to Epson’s one-year warranty is pretty less. Though, for any sort of the troubleshooting you always can contact the telephonic tech support and also you will have Canon’s “InstaExchange”. Under the “InstaExchange” protection you will instantly get a whole new printer along with instructions for using the RMA number for sending the defective printer back to Canon. The best thing about this service is that if you have made your call before 3 p.m. ET from Monday to Friday, your new printer will be shipped on the very same day.

Word from the Experts

If you are looking for an affordable printer for printing your text and photos at decent pace and with respectable quality then the Canon Pixma iP2600 is an admirable option. Although, we would have appreciated the inclusion of external ports for direct image uploading, but you’ll be far more than satisfied to see printer’s ability to print decent quality photos and text at really impressive pace.