Canon Pixma iP2600 Reviews

By Binde Rai
Reviewed.com Editorial Staff
June 04, 2008


The $49.99 Canon iP2600 inkjet printer can print both photos and documents at fast speeds, but the quality of the output is somewhat disappointing. It uses only two ink cartridges: one black and the other a tri-color cartridge containing cyan, magenta, and yellow. This means you have to change the entire cartridge if one color runs out, even if the other colors aren’t empty. Other printers have the color in individual cartridges, so you can swap one at a time. Replacement black cartridges for the iP2600 cost $15.99, while color ones cost $19.99.



The Canon iP2600 has a sleek, stylish exterior, but it is lacking the features found on many other printers; there are no memory card slots, no LCD screen, and no on-printer controls. This means you can’t take a memory card from a camera and plug it into the printer for quick printing; everything has to be done through the computer. For many users, controlling the printer through the computer isn’t a problem, but it makes the process of printing lengthier and more complex, which may be a problem for some users.

While printing text documents, the ip2600 takes just less than 11 seconds per print and about 23 seconds for a 4 x 6 photograph. That’s an impressive speed for an inkjet; it’s one of the fastest we’ve tested. But it isn’t able to match the fast pace of a color laser printer. The HP Color Laserjet 3600n prints documents at 17 pages per minute, and the Canon iP2600 came far under that with 5.66 pages per minute. But the Canon iP2600 does overcome the HP Photosmart D7460, its closest print speed competitor, by 1.91 page per minute when printing text documents. It’s a speedy printer, but it’s nowhere near as fast as a laser printer.

This speed comes at the cost of quality, however; our prints had streaks on them, and the printer does a poor job reproducing skin tones - the Canon iP2600 gives perfectly healthy looking skin tones an unpleasant yellow cast. In addition to this, the iP2600 took the strong, bright colors that we use in our tests and made them into pale pastel imitations of the originals.

It also has problems printing good-quality black-and-white image prints. Some printers, like the HP Photosmart D7460, are able to print respectable black-and-white image prints by just selecting the grayscale option in the printer driver, but to get decent black-and-white prints out of the iP2600 we had to try several different sets of settings. However, the results were decent in the end; the prints had deep black and good shadow and highlight detail.

The Canon iP2600 only comes with one software package: Easy-PhotoPrint EX. The software carries commonly-used editing tools like red-eye, auto color adjustments, cropping, and toggle brightness and contrast enhancements. It’s no Photoshop, but it’s adequate for basic editing and can be accessed through the Canon My Printer window that pops up automatically at your computer’s startup. The included software isn’t helpful in fixing the color inaccuracy problems we had when it came to printing photographs. No matter how the colors were adjusted in Easy-PhotoPrint EX, the skin colors still printed defectively.

The Canon Pixma iP2600 won’t print lab-quality photographs but is a good choice for someone who needs a simple, straightforward document printer at a low price. The Canon Pixma iP2600 is currently available for $49.99.