Canon Pixma iP6600D review

A large 89mm (3.5-inch) LCD screen, a built-in card reader, good photo output and duplex printing of up to 300 sheets between refills make the 9,600x2,400dpi Canon Pixma iP6600D a solid fit for digital camera owners who prize versatility and convenience.

However, fuzzy text that can be output no more quickly than four pages per minute limits its appeal for home-office users.

Design
It took less than 10 minutes to set up the Canon Pixma iP6600D -- we spent most of that removing protective postage tape and installing the printhead and the six ink cartridges. A handy red lamp illuminates each ink tank from below when it's correctly installed and flashes when that tank is running dry. After that came installing the printer drivers and the optional image-editing, albuming and Web-printing software from the CD, connecting the power cord and plugging in the supplied USB 2.0 cable.

At 7.3kg and 429 by 185 by 305mm, this printer commands quite a chunk of desk space, which grows another 200mm out of the front for the flip-down 50-sheet output tray. The flip-up vertical autofeeder tray accepts 150 sheets of paper, as does a second input tray tucked underneath. It fits flush with the printer when loaded with 100x150mm or 125x180mm paper but juts outward 115mm more when loaded with 215x280mm paper.

The top panel is a maze of buttons and lights. On the left, there's a power button and a status LED, a feed switch to alternate the paper source between the autofeeder and the cassette, a Save button that transfers images from a memory card to your computer, an Easy-PhotoPrint Startup button for browsing images on the memory card, and an error light. The LCD, which you can adjust to any convenient viewing angle -- mandatory because it was difficult to view off-axis -- fronts a four-way cursor-control pad with central okay button. You use the pad to navigate menus, select photos, choose the number of copies to print, scroll the view screen or specify other print options.

To either side of this pad are a menu button, a Back button to return to the previous screen, a search key for sorting photos on the memory card by date and a settings key that summons two screens of printing options. Choices range from print size to red-eye and noise reduction, as well as optimisation features such as Face Brightening and contrast, hue and saturation enhancement.

But wait! There's more -- on the right side there's a Trim button for cropping the displayed image, as well as a pair of zoom buttons, a print button and finally, a stop/reset key for throwing in the towel and starting anew.

At the far right edge of the front panel reside the IrDA sensor, a PictBridge port and a cover hiding two slots that accept all common digital camera memory-card formats, as well as SmartMedia, xD-Picture Card, Memory Stick Duo/Pro Duo and miniSD with adaptors.

As with other Pixmas, the iP6600D supplies versatile paper-feeding options so that it's easy to load letterhead and second sheets into separate trays or ordinary letter-size paper in one tray and photo paper in the other. When the same stock is loaded into both trays, the iP6600D can be set to switch from one tray to the other automatically for print jobs of up to 300 pages. It's easy to accidentally direct output to the wrong tray, so I recommend using the driver's Paper Allocation feature to specify the type of paper loaded into the cassette. Then, when printing jobs from your computer, the printer will switch to the autofeeder automatically if the cassette is not the best choice for the current job.

Features
Although text is not one of the Canon Pixma iP6600D's strengths, the automatic duplexing can be a valuable feature for home users who want to output lecture notes or essays to both sides of a sheet or (with special two-sided photo paper) print picture sheets that are ready to slip into an album or a scrapbook. The Canon feeds the sheet out the front, then pulls it back in and prints on the reverse. Nothing jammed when we duplexed, but there's a door on the back of the printer for extricating sheets that may become ensnared in the paper path. The printer driver makes it easy to allow space for stapling any side of the sheet.

You can perform most chores needed for directly printing your digital photos, including specifying layout and colour balance. But if you want to print images from your computer, you'll find the five-tab driver has the same functions and more.