New Canon printers (page 1: New product line)

New product line

On August 22, Canon unveiled its latest line of printers. If you missed our News on 22 July, you may be surprised to learn that Canon has added electronic chips and print heads to cartridges to prevent the use of compatible products. At first we were quite suspicious, but we now have to admit that Canon was successful in this transition. The new printers (those including print heads) are cheaper to use in office mode, faster and provide better results in photo mode.
We received three printers

The iP1600 and iP2200 are entry level products with monobloc cartridges and integrated print heads.

The iP3000 and iP4000 are replaced by the iP4200. There is still the double-sided printing function and separate cartridges. However, it’s faster, now includes identification chips on cartridges, and smaller ink drops at 1 picoliter.

Our expectations

We strongly criticised last year’s line of printers. The first iP color table was inaccurate. Pictures were too red or even turned brown they were so dark. Amongst other problems, we also noticed a recurrent pausing problem in the middle printing office documents. Consequently, the print rate was divided by two.

The release of new cartridges raises the following issues:

With previous generations when the message empty “cartridges” popped up, it was still possible to force printing. This gave us the possibility to use much more ink out of each cartridge. Will the presence of these chips now block this as is the case with Epson, HP and Lexmark when this message shows up?

Including print heads on cartridges usually results in two improvements. It guarantees an optimum printing quality throughout the printer’s life and saves approximately 15% of ink as there is no longer the need for print head cleaning. This is the case for HP and Lexmark printers. Will it also happen for Canon?

New monobloc cartridges are much more expensive than the previous generation’s. Canon says that they include more ink. Is this true?

The iP4200’s ink drops are reduced from 2 to 1 picoliter. This size was only reached last year with one professional Canon printer. Is the quality even better?

Here are the main lines.

Tests

Printers should nicely print text, graphics and photos. We tested all of these modes with all types of documents. Texts are printed from OpenOffice 1.1.4, web pages from Firefox, and photos from Photoshop CS.

The modes tested (each time we evaluated print quality and speed ) and types of documents are:

Draft monochrome, text, graphic picture extracts.

Standard monochrome, text, graphic, picture extract.

Standard draft, text, graphic, picture extract.

High quality, 20 photos 4” x 6” color.

High quality, 2 photos 4” x 6” without borders.

High quality, 2 photos 4” x 6” black and white.

High quality, 1 color test pattern.

High quality, 1 photo 8 1/2” x 11” color. High quality, 1 photo 8 1/2” x 11” black and white.

In evaluating a printer we decided to prioritize color over black and white results. The weighting of color printings, its speed and quality, was given twice as much importance as monochrome documents and black and white photos.