The Canon Pixma iP3000 - A great general purpose printer for home use.
Written: Oct 04 '04 (Updated Oct 09 '04)
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Pros: Duplexing, very fast text and graphics printing with good quality, two feed trays
Cons: Almost too many options to choose from when you print.
The Bottom Line: A great value for home users who print a combination of text, graphics and photo's
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| nc10's Full Review: Canon PIXMA iP3000 InkJet Photo Printer |
The Canon Pixma iP3000 Photo Printer is an inexpensive mid range model in Canon’s new Pixma line of Photo Printers, which appear to be replacing in their “i” line of printers (like the similarly priced i560 or i860). We recently added a computer to my wife’s piano studio in our home, and have been looking for an inexpensive printer to set up with this computer. Some of the features which Epson touts for this printer that got
my attention were:
- four individual ink tanks, black, magenta, cyan, and yellow
- true built-in 2 sided printing (duplexing)
- two paper trays and feed paths
- borderless, high resolution photo printing
- “across the board” fast print speeds (37 seconds to print a 4X6” photo, 22 ppm black text printing in draft mode, according to Canon)
Other notable features that I've sinced learned about after using the printer include
- a quiet print mode, which can programmed in at certain or all times
- adding stamps (confidential, private, draft, etc) to printed pages
- adding faint background images to prints
- reducing 2 or 4 pages to one page
- booklet printing
- the Print Advisor, a wizard that helps you select the right print mode for most jobs
- optional auto power off
- PictBridge compatible
I've found these features all work as described.
I purchased the Canon Pixma iP3000 from Amazon for $91 delivered, taking advantage of slight discount Amazon offered to users of their a9.com search engine and Amazon’s free shipping option. In the box was the printer, 4 full size ink cartridges, a print head, five 4” x 6” sheets of Canon Photo Glossy Pro photo paper, a cd with drivers and printing software, an effective quickstart guide, a 94 page manual with table of contents and index, and a power cord. Apparently the power supply is built into the printer, so that no external power block is needed. A USB cable, required to use this printer, was not included.
I had also recently purchased a comparably priced printer for myself, an Epson R200. The R200 is a 6 color photo printer, which also supports printing on cd’s. Since these two models compete almost directly with each other, I’ll make comparisons where I can. Both are good printers, and each has unique features which may be more important than the small differences in performance.
Installation and Setup
This printer setup was quick and easy, following the quick start guide The steps are 1) remove the packing tape, 2) power the printer on, 3) install the 4 ink cartridges and power back off, 4) connect the usb cable to your computer, 5) load paper, and 6) turn on the printer and install the software. This printer is compatible with Win 98 or later and Mac 10.2.1 to 10.3.x, via a driver download on Canon’s website. Some features, like booklet and reverse order printing are not supported in the Mac environment. In addition to the printer drivers, the optional software available to install includes
Easy Photo Print, software to print and make minor edits to photo’s. Well suited for this printer and its substantial printing options.
PhotoRecord – Software to "frame" pictures or to create photo albums.
Easy-Web Print – This software integrates into Internet Explorer, and provides one button access to many of the IP3000’s most commonly used options when printing web pages. (Unfortunately it does not integrate into Firefox or other alternative browsers.)
Using the Canon Pixma iP3000
The iP3000 has a very boxy look, even more so when you fold in the sheet feeder on the back of the printer and the output tray coming out bottom front of the printer. Paper fed from the back, upright sheet feeder takes a “straight though” pass through the printer. Below the output tray is a second paper tray, where paper lays flat, printed side down. I’ve loaded 4 X 6 photo paper in this tray, though it will also hold full size paper or envelopes. If you are using less than full size photo paper, this second tray can be closed and hidden inside the printer. I’ve not had any problems with paper feeds in our first few days of heavy use with this printer. With the front paper tray open, you see three buttons on this printer, on/off, cassette select, and a resume button. The cassette select button toggles which paper tray is fed from, as well as a LED on the printer which indicates which tray is being fed from. (Its pretty easy to forget which tray is set to print from, and I’ve printed documents on photo paper a couple of times)
Printing Text
The iP3000 has 4 print modes, High, Standard, Draft, and Custom. The custom mode offers a slide bar to balance quality and speed, and well as choices for half toning. There’s also a bunch of other options in the printer driver, including grey scale, color adjustments, booklet, duplex, multiple pages on one page, force fit to one page, and other printing options. Fortunately, there’s also a print advisor button which brings up a wizard asking what you want to print, and what kind of paper you have, and then adjusts the custom settings to fit those selections.
To test this printer further, I used a MS word document with 6 double spaced pages. In draft mode, 36 seconds were required from the time I pushed the print button, to the time the last page was printed. This was a very similar time to my Epson R200. Both printers produced “sharp” text at the draft setting, but the ip3000’s print was darker, nearly as dark as standard mode.
I then used the Print Advisor button to explain I was printing a text only document on plain paper. The advisor adjusted the settings again. In this “custom” mode for text only, 52 seconds were required to print 6 pages of high quality text. This is much much faster than the R200 prints in standard text mode (which was about 25 seconds/page), and much faster than any other inkjet I’ve used in standard text mode.
Keeping the settings the same, I then checked the duplex box in the printer driver to duplex this six page document. This slowed printing considerably, to about 2 minutes and 50 seconds. As the printer just finishes printing the 1st page of a document, it pulls it back into the printer rather than letting it drop into the paper tray. The time required to pull the page back into the printer and start printing the back side of the page slows things down considerably. Still, even in duplex mode, print speeds for a standard text document were comparable to my Epson R200 in standard text mode.
In the “High” quality mode, the 6 page document took 3 times as long to print, 2 minutes and 55 seconds. At first glance, its hard to see much difference between standard and high quality mode, but when I examined the text under a magnifying glass, I could see the text was slightly sharper in the High quality mode, with almost every letter perfectly formed. In the custom text mode, under a magnifying glass, you could see an occasional misplaced or misplaced “dot” on the edges of a few letters.
The iP3000 also offers a Quiet mode for this printer. This must be selected through the printer driver outside of the application you are printing from, as this selection downloads different settings to the printer. If desired, you can tell the printer to print in quiet modes at certain times. We currently have this printer set to print quietly from 10pm to 6am. This printer is reasonably quiet normally, but in Quiet mode it is almost silent when printing, except when it picks up each new page and finishes a page. Quiet mode slows printing somewhat, my 6 page document took 92 seconds to print in quiet mode, vs 52 seconds in the standard text mode, still a very competitive time in the world of $100 inkjets. Text quality was still very good.
Another feature of the iP3000 is the print two (or more) pages on one page. When I printed the 6 page document on three pages, only 26 seconds were required. Two pages were laid out side by side in landscape mode on each page, with sharp, easily readable text.
Plain paper text print speeds, 6 page double spaced document
6 seconds per page in draft mode
8.7 seconds per page in "Fast Text" mode (Canon's recommendation for text)
28 seconds/page in duplex/Fast Text mode
29 seconds/page in Highest quality mode
15 seconds/page in Quiet/Fast Text mode
5 seconds per document page in "2 pages reduced on one page" mode (9 seconds per print page)
Printing Text plus Graphics
The iP3000 handles routine graphics printing well. To test this, I printed several reviews from the Epinions website, a nice mixture of text plus graphics. Printing a full three page review with the “text only” setting used for text printing, where only grey scale is used (no color) required only 20 seconds. The images were ok, much better than “newspaper” quality, but not really sharp. Still, this would be a good economical mode to use when printing web pages to reference something while shopping.
In the “High quality mode, about 7 minutes were required to print a 3 page full color copy of an Epinions web pages. Images were sharp, even with a 3 dimensional appearance, but the time required doesn’t seem to justify the slight quality advantages over the standard modes.
In standard print modes, a 5 page print out of a web page takes about 2 minutes and 15 seconds, again with good quality, no banding, sharp text, no bleeding on the edges of images, sharp, distinct colors, etc. In draft mode, the time required was 1 minute and 40 seconds, with fainter images and print.
Print times for pages of mixed text and graphics on plain paper:
Highest quality: about 2 min 20 seconds/page
Standard mode: about 27 seconds per page
Draft mode: about 20 seconds per page
Photo Printing
Epson claimed the R200 could print a 4X6 photo in 37 seconds. Canon makes the same claim for the iP3000. I’ve not been able to duplicate that speed, in either case, though the iP3000 does seem to have a very slight speed advantage over the R200. One 4X6 image takes about 65 seconds to print, from the time the print button is pushed, using Canon’s Photo Paper Plus Glossy paper. Actual printing doesn’t start until about 15 seconds after the print button is pushed. Printing 4 images back to back takes 3 ½ minutes. Full page photo’s take about 2 minutes to print. I’ve tried printing on Canon Photo Paper Plus Glossy, Epson Premium glossy photo paper, and Georgia Pacific Image Plus photo paper (a “cheap” brand) The Canon and Epson paper clearly provide brighter images if you compare images side by side, but even the prints on cheap paper look ok.
Print times and quality are very close between the Epson R200 and the Canon iP3000. When I compared test prints taken from the website InkArt (http://www.inkjetart.com/custom/index.html), the only difference I could really notice was that the Epson printer added a greenish tint to some greys, and perhaps the colors were slightly brighter/less dull on the Epson printer (though the difference was very small, almost imagined, to my eyes). Choice of photo paper is likely a more important choice than choosing between the R200 and iP3000, if you are concerned about print quality of photo's. In both cases I feel that the print quality is very good, amazing for a sub $100 printer, though if forced to pick, I'd give the R200 and its 6 color ink system a slight advantage in producing bright realistic images.
Summary of photo print times:
Single 4X6 photo print time:
1st print is 65 seconds, about 50 seconds/print thereafter
Full page photo’s take 2 minutes to print
Cost of Ownership
Replacement black cartridges cost about $14, with each color cartridge costing $12. Canon rates the black cartridges at 740 pages with 1500 characters per page. (Using MS Word’s counter, I found my pages of double space text contains 1600 to 1700 characters per page). This would give an ink cost for text of about 2 cents per page, pretty good. Single spaced pages cost 3.5-4 cents each to print. The cyan, black, and yellow cartridges are rated for 570, 440, and 380 pages each printing a specific iso test pattern (ISO-JIS-SCID No. 5). From the reproduction of this image on Canon’s site, it looks this image is very approximately equivalent to a 4 X 6 image in ink requirements. Based on this, and our experience, I expect ink costs for photo printing to be 10-15 cents per print, much less than the cost of prints from my Epson printer. (PC Magazine also projects very low photo print costs for this printer.)
Support
The Pixma iP3000 comes with a 1 year warranty, though you must send the printer for repair or replacement, and you must keep a copy of your receipt. Interactive trouble shooting, email support, FAQ’s, driver downloads and other information is available at the Canon Website. I’ve emailed Canon support several times about another Canon printer we own (Multifunction F30), and have usually gotten prompt, accurate replies (it did take them a few days to figure out the F30 drivers had some problems with Win XP Service Pack 2). Canon also offers a few printing projects for parties and other occasions, a nice but limited selection. The included manual, help files, and electronic guide that’s installed with the printer are first class.
I like this printer a lot, and highly recommend it. We've not had any problems with paper jams from either feed tray. It seems to be faster than my Epson R200, with lower ink costs, and almost equivalent print quality. Of course, the R200 has the “print on cd” feature, unique in the world of sub $100 printers. The iP3000 has a few neat features of its own, like the dual print trays, duplex printing and extensive range of print options, making this printer you should strongly consider when looking for an inexpensive general purpose printer for home use.
Website:
http://consumer.usa.canon.com/ir/controller?act=ModelDetailAct&fcategoryid=117&modelid=10238
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 91
Operating System: Windows and Macintosh
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