CANON PIXMA IP3600 BLACK OEM INK CARTRIDGE

Canon PIXMA iP3600 Review

Overview:

Photographic printing has never been so simple. The PIXMA IP3600 is a CMYK photo-printer, using individual tanks for each color, with a pigment and dye black inks. Incredible 9600 x 2400 color resolutions, the IP3600 can produce borderless print in 41 seconds.

Pros:

The PIXMA IP3600 weighs under 12½ pounds and when stored takes up 17” x 11.7” sitting on your desk, and only 6” high. The printer makes things simple by having an ON/OFF button and a RESUME/CANCEL button.  No complicated displays or menus.

9600 x 2400 dpi resolution produces photo-quality images at speeds up to 17 ppm for color and 26 ppm for B&W (maximum resolution 600 x 600 dpi). However, if all you want to do is print 4” x 6” snapshots, the PIXMA can do it in as fast as 41 seconds.

The PIXMA has two places to load paper. The front tray can hold up to 150 sheets of Letter-size 20# bond paper, and the top feeder in the rear can handle up to another 150 sheets. The top feeder can support sizes up to 8½“ Legal and 8½” x 26” banners. Borderless prints up to 8 ½” x 11” is possible.

When you have a compact printer on your desk, the next thing you might wonder is how loud the thing is going to be. The PIXMA produces only 41 dB of noise when printing. That’s the sound level of whispering.

Connecting to the IP3600 is using the USB 2.0 interface to directly connect to a PC or Mac.  Since this is a personal printer, to connect multiple computers requires “sharing” the host computer or buying an external print server device. Digital cameras or cell phones that support PictBridge can be directly connected to the printer via USB port.

In case you forgot to turn on the “red eye” mode before taking a picture and you don’t have Adobe Photoshop, Canon’s Easy-PhotoPrint EX software literally makes it easy for anyone with a computer to do common photo retouches before immortalizing them on print.

Cons:

Although touted as a “five-ink” printer, the IP3600 is not a “five-color” photo printer. The printer is still a CMYK 4-color printer. The 4-color ink printing will not produce the wider color spectrum as the 6-color printers, but that would only be more apparent with enlarged prints rather than 4” x 6” snapshots.

There comes a time when things can be too simple. While the IP3600 controls are quite simple, interpreting the controls is not. Depending on the error, the warning LED will flash between two to sixteen times. If you’re not instantly aware of an error, it’s easy to miscount the number of flashes.

Canon does not offer PCL or PostScript print emulation with this model. Instead, the PIXMA uses Canon’s proprietary printer language. The Canon emulator will do the job, but imaging problems like “ghosting” may occur using Adobe Creative Suite applications without a PostScript print option.  For most users there won’t be any noticeable difference in performance.