Canon Pixma iP2600 review

Performance
The Canon Pixma iP2600 performed admirably in our speed tests. The Pixma churned out 5.68 pages per minute (ppm) of black-and-white text, falling just short of the HP Deskjet 4260 at 6.03 ppm and the Lexmark Z845 at 6.85 ppm. The three printers are all within the same general price range, so the slight deficit is expected and acceptable compared with other budget inkjet printers.

Print speeds (in pages per minute)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

PPM (photo)

PPM (text)

Lexmark Z845

0.48

6.85

HP Deskjet D5260

1.01

6.03

Canon Pixma iP2600

0.89

5.68

The Canon also performed surprisingly well in our quality tests. It printed text on to generic office paper with dense, well-saturated ink. The characters formed precise, crisp edges with no visible blurriness and minimal misshapes in 8x loupe magnification. The colour graphics test came out solid and evenly distributed, but there were certain portions of our graphics document that came out with a slightly neutral colour, specifically in areas with gradual colour gradients.

We repeated our tests in three iterations, and these imperfections were consistent but will likely be unnoticeable unless you have a sharp eye for print quality. In all cases, the photos produced vivid colours and text that popped from the page. Most importantly, we found these results to be accurate over the cartridges' entire life cycle.

We were also impressed with the 100x150mm photos we printed on Canon's semigloss paper. They're definitely far from perfect, but the colours were balanced evenly and our subjects' faces appeared to contain an even amount of cyan and magenta, a task that's difficult for most lower-end photo printers to achieve. The solid printing performance and relatively quick output speeds make this printer an affordable choice for printing text, light graphics documents and digital pictures.

Edited by Rich Brown
Additional editing by Nick Hide