Canon PIXMA PRO-10 Pro Reviews

The Canon Pixma PRO-10 photo printer can output gallery-worthy prints, and is an especially good choice if your photographic style tends toward the noir.

A wide-format printer in general is a different animal from a standard photo printer. You can get exceptional prints from the Pro-10, but it’s going to cost you time tweaking the image and possibly doing multiple prints before you hit the right spot. It’s also going to cost significantly more in supplies, both in ink and specialty papers. There’s really no point in buying a printer like the Pro-10 if you aren’t using it to obtain gallery-quality prints. And that means using specialty papers, either from Canon or another supplier. Canon’s website provides a list of vendors and their specific papers for which there is an ICC profile available. But none of these things are negatives when measured in context of obtaining a print worthy of being framed and hung on the wall. If you are willing to put in the effort of tweaking your photos’ color settings, and put up with the cost, the Pro-10 won’t disappoint you.

This pigment inkjet provides finely detailed and surprisingly cheap photo prints

The Canon Pro-10 printer produces extremely high quality images, both in B&W and color. With a list price of $699 the Pro-10 competes with the R3000 (currently and a reduced price of $649). However, the larger 26ml R3000 ink tanks provide a slight edge in ink cost per ml. Add the chroma optimizer to the Pro-10 (a feature not found on the R3000) and you have the potential for better Dmax with less bronzing and metamerism. The major downside to the Pro-10 is if your preference leans toward fine art paper, as these limitations will probably keep you from buying the printer. Hopefully, Canon is already working on these issues we’ll see a firmware update in the near future. Back to one of our initial questions with the introduction of the Pro-10 – how does it compare to the Pro-1? Why should you pay $300 more? The increased depth (front to back) of the Pro-1 allows for a slightly less curved paper path with using the manual paper feed for thick paper stock. The inks are less expensive in the Pro-1; $1.00 per ml versus $1.07 per ml for the Pro-10. At 36ml per ink tank, the Pro-1 also allows for less down time changing inks. Finally, while there should be advantages to the Pro1's two extra gray inks, in the course of our BW testing we couldn't find much to fault the Pro10 for compared to its more expensive sibling. As is expected, the Pro-10 delivers excellent print quality. As that is how most photographers judge a printer, $300 extra for the Pro-1 is a big difference for a printer with only marginally better print quality when all things are taken into account. Given the choice of buying a Pro-1 or Pro-10, we'd probably gravitate towards the latter.

The Canon PIXMA Pro-10 is capable of excellent photo lab quality prints, with excellent glossy prints. Colours are particularly impressive with accurate recreation of photo colours, as well as excellent handling of subtle skin tones and hair colour. With dedicated black and white inks we were hoping for better black and white prints, as ours came through with a slight sepia tone. There aren't a massive selection of A3 photo printers available at this price point, with models coming in at much cheaper with less ink colours, or more expensive for larger ink tanks as standard. However with small ink cartridges it could quickly add up if you plan to print a lot of A3 colour photos, as a fresh set will set you back around £88. The printer has good Wi-Fi connectivity that is easy to setup, and it didn't mind printing large 36 megapixel photos from Photoshop. The Canon PIXMA Pro-10 feels like a well built product that should last well, producing excellent colour prints, although at quite a high price.