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A replacement for the Canon Pixma Pro-100 reviewed here back in 2013, the Canon Pixma Pro-200 ($599.99), a wireless inkjet photo printer, is significantly smaller and leaner than its predecessor and costs a little less to use. That small footprint means it only supports paper up to 13 by 19 inches (supertabloid), as opposed to the larger 17-by-22-inch paper supported by Canon’s imagePrograf Pro-1000 and similar machines. The Pro-200 is an excellent photo printer, but it doesn’t support media rolls for creating banners and panoramas, so it comes in a close second to the Epson SureColor P700 ($799.99), our Editors’ Choice for13-inch professional-grade photo printers.
Lean and Efficient
Measuring 7.9 by 25.2 by 15 inches (WHD) with its trays closed and weighing 32 pounds, the Pro-200 is, according to Canon, 15% smaller than the preceding Pro-10 and Pro-100 models. (One of the more common complaints about those early Canon pro-grade photo printers is their hulking size and weight.) The newer Pro-200 and Pro-300 are several inches smaller in all directions and more than 10 pounds lighter than the Pro-100.
The P700 is similar in size and girth, but what’s inside the chassis has one big difference: Like most Epson SureColor machines, it comes with built-in paper roll support. On the bright side, the Pro-200 does support limited banner printing up to 39 inches long.
The full-featured control panel consists of several navigation buttons and a non-touch 3-inch color display. As with most professional-grade photo printers, the majority of your editing and enhancements are handled via the bundled software (or the image manipulation software of your choice), which we’ll look at shortly. You can also configure and operate the printer, monitor consumables, and generate and print usage reports via a web portal that runs on virtually any browser, even the one on your smartphone or tablet.
As for paper handling, the Pro-200 supports a variety of paper shapes ranging in size from 3.5 by 3.5 inches to 13 by 39 inches. That includes three of Canon’s square formats: 3.5 by 3.5, 5 by 5, and 12 by 12 inches.
The front cassette of the Pro-200 can hold up to 100 sheets ranging in thickness from 64 to 380 gsm (grams per square meter), or 17 to 170 lbs. A one-sheet tray on the back holds sizes from 8 by 10 inches to 13 by 39 inches. That will suffice for many purposes, but if you want to print anything longer, look to the Epson SureColor P700 and its 10.7-foot paper rolls. 13-by-39-inch pre-cut sheets and custom sheets are expensive, so you may want to buy a paper roll and cut your own sheets to feed into the Pro-200.
If you’re still storing and distributing data on optical media, the Pro-200 also prints directly onto pre-surfaced CD ROMs and DVDs.
Professional-Grade Software and Loads of Paper Choices
Most photographers and artists use high-end graphic software such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, but for the few who don’t, Canon has developed Canon Professional Print & Layout Software, a combination photo editing and document layout program with a user-friendly interface and powerful photo processing tools. It’s included with the Pro-200.
Canon also includes Media Configuration Tool, which makes it easier to manage your various media types and their International Color Consortium (ICC) profiles. These define specific paper types by their characteristics—such as absorption rate, drying speed, and matte or glossy finish—and inform the printer how best to mlx and apply ink.
The Pro-200 can connect to a Canon digital camera or video recorder via Wireless PictBridge, to a single PC via USB 2.0, and to a network via Ethernet or Wi-Fi 802.11/a/b/g/n. Mobile connections are supported through Canon Print Service, Apple AirPrint, and Mopria.
Simply Flawless Artwork
The Pro-200’s 4,800-by-2,400-dpi resolution and FINE (Full-Photolithography Inkjet Nozzle Engineering) printhead technology produce brilliant and brightly colored prints of your photos and artwork. Like the Pro-100, the Pro-200 uses eight cartridges: cyan, magenta, yellow, black (CMYK), photo cyan, photo magenta, light gray, and gray. Canon’s Chromatic clear coat is absent; it’s only installed on larger and fancier models such as the Pro-1000.
Typically, we rate printers by pages per minute (ppm). However, with this type of printer, speed is not as critical as output quality, and its features are designed to optimize detail, color management, special effects, and so on. To assess output quality, I printed several images and graphics layouts ranging in size from 4-by-6-inch snapshots to 13-by-19-inch photos and posters.
See How We Test PrintersSee How We Test Printers
In our earlier tests of the Pro-100, it had a few minor color-shift issues, but Canon seems to have corrected those for the Pro-200; even upon close inspection, I couldn’t find any notable quality issues. Colors came out accurate and vibrant, and detail was exceptional. In addition, the two gray ink cartridges and single black tank churn out exceptional monochrome halftones, some of the best I’ve seen.
If you do care about speed, Canon says the Pro-200 can print an 11-by-14-inch bordered color photo (A3+) in 1 minute, 30 seconds, and an 8-by-10-inch bordered color photo (A4) in 53 seconds. “Bordered” means that the content comes out with a quarter-inch margin on all four sides. Borderless images with edge-to-edge bleeds, which can look more professionally designed, take almost twice as long to print as the same content with borders. The Pro-200 prints borderless output on all the paper sizes it supports.
A Boutique Machine With Champagne Tastes
Like its siblings and competitors, nothing about the Pro-200 says bargain. Both ink and premium photo paper can be hard on your budget.
The Pro-200 uses Canon’s ChromaLife100+ CLI-65 8 inks. According to Canon, ChromaLife100+ is specially formulated for enhanced color gamuts (ranges) in magenta and reds, deeper blacks, and improvement of dark color reproduction in blues and reds. The Pro-200 CLI-65 8 Color Pack contains a full set of dye-based CLI-65 12.6 milliliter (ml) ink cartridges. You can buy the complete eight-cartridge set from Canon for $105.99 or each individual tank for $13.99. (That’s about a $5 savings when you buy the entire set.) That comes out to about $1.05 per ml, which is what passes for inexpensive in this printer class.
The Pro-300 uses 10 14.4ml ChromaLife100+ cartridges for a cost of $1.30 per ml. Epson’s P700 comes with 25ml cartridges that sell for $37.99 each, or a whopping $1.52 per ml.
For the best per-ml value, consider a 17-inch model, such as Canon’s Pro-1000. Its 80ml cartridges sell for $59.99, or about 75 cents per ml. If you print a lot, the lower running costs will make up the difference in the printer’s purchase price.
As for paper, I found 50-sheet packages on Canon’s website at about $2 per sheet. Shop around and you’ll find these papers or equivalents for less at Amazon, B&H Photo, and several other online outlets. In my experience, using Canon’s papers with its pro-grade photo printers garners excellent results, but third-party papers from Hammermill and other paper mills can save you quite a bit of money; you can find ultra-glossy supertabloid-size photo paper, for example, for as low as 55 cents per sheet. Using smaller sizes will cost considerably less, of course, in both paper and ink. Make sure to set up the printer with your paper’s ICC profile for the best results.
A Long-Awaited Upgrade
Pro-grade inkjet photo printers aren’t upgraded often, but when they are, the improvements in print quality and feature sets are considerable. The Pro-200 is several steps up from the Pro-100, with a reduced footprint, an optimized ink and color palette, and a larger onboard display. My only real complaint about this and other Canon pro-grade models is their lack of support for paper rolls. If you have no need for banners or panoramas longer than 39 inches, this is an attractive printer that produces gorgeous images (especially grayscale ones) with lower running costs than most others in its class.
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