CANON PIXMA IX7000 5-COLOR INK COMBO PACK

Canon PIXMA iX7000 Review

Overview:

There comes a time when you need to print something big, but you don’t want to use a large plotter just to print it.  That’s where the network-ready Canon PIXMA iX7000 Inkjet printer comes in handy.  Able to print sheets up to 13 x 19, the CMYK printer has two types of black ink tanks and a clear-coat for a professional finish.

Pros:

The first thing to remember is the PIXMA iX7000 is a color printer for business printing and publishing, not for printing photographs. It uses the industry standard 4-color CMYK system instead of the 6-color ink used by “photo-printers”. While it does a good job with enlargements, it will not give the same color saturation and quality a true photo-printer can give.

You don’t want to share your desk with the iX7000. With a footprint of about 25½ inches wide and 20½ inches deep (over 30 inches deep fully extended), this 44 pound wide-format printer needs plenty of elbow room.

The PIXMA has three ways to load paper and media to provide the maximum flexibility for any paper weight. Up to 250 sheets of regular 20# bond paper can be loaded from the top of the printer, another 250 sheets from the cassette tray, and up to 10 sheets, labels, or transparencies in the multi-media front loader. Media sizes can be as small as 4” x 6” up to 13” x 19”. The 13” x 19” print area allows for making full-bleed Tabloid or Ledger-size prints.  If that isn’t enough, the iX7000 has a duplexer for making two-sided brochures and newsletters.

With 512 jet nozzles, black print quality is as high as 600 x 600 dpi. With six times the nozzles, color resolutions can go as high as 4800 x 1200 dpi. For laser-quality printing, the PIXMA iX7000’s print speeds are comparable to an actual multi-pass color laser printer: 10.2 images per second (ipm) for black prints, 8.1 ipm in color. However, if all you want to do is print 4” x 6” snapshots, the PIXMA can do it in as fast as 44 seconds.

In case you forgot to turn on the “red eye” mode before taking a picture and you aren’t a Photoshop expert, the PIXMA can make automatic photo corrections and red-eye removal right on from the printer.

Not only does the iX7000 have a USB 2.0 interface to directly connect to a PC or Mac, it has auto-switching Ethernet for 10Mbps and 100Mbps network speeds.

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 36 dB – literally whisper quiet.

Cons:

Unlike many of the MX and MP PXIMA models, the iX7000 doesn’t offer USB or flash-memory slots to a digital camera or flash drive for direct printing.

Although touted as a “six-ink” printer, remember the iX7000 is not a “six-color” photo printer. The iX7000 is still a CMYK 4-color printer. The 4-color ink printing will not produce the wider color spectrum as the 6-colors printers, but that would only be more apparent with enlarged prints rather than 4” x 6” snapshots.