Canon PIXMA Pro-200s first impressions

First of all, I’m just a hobbyist — not a professional photographer. I have no intention of selling prints, archiving them for future generations, etc. So, with that said, the entry-level “pro” printer from Canon is surprisingly good.

I think that it’s pretty easy to come away from YouTube and the Internet in general thinking that photo printing is for pigment inks, period — that dye inks, as used in the Pro-200, are so inferior that they aren’t worthy of consideration, especially if you print black and white pictures or print on matte paper. Well, that’s clearly not true…

The truth is far more nuanced and the likes of Keith Cooper do a great job of explaining the finer details, but you could easily believe that something like the Pro-200s (or it’s predecessor, the Pro-200) give up a lot once you stray from color prints on glossy paper. Maybe they do give up something… but that doesn’t mean that the results aren’t already pretty spectacular. Looking at test target prints across a few representative Canon papers was eye opening — the predicted drop-off in quality when printing on matte paper or black and white print metamerism failures didn’t materialize. I’m sure that I’ll find issues as I try other papers, but the results on the handful of Canon and Red River papers I have tried so far are very nice.

Everything is relative — compared with ten- or twelve-ink printers, this is probably a clumsy toy — but I think that an entry-level “pro” printer exceeds hobbyist needs quite handsomely. To be clear, I don’t think that this is specific to the Canon Pro-200s. It likely is true for the whole class of competitors at this level (like the Epson ET-8550).

So, in short, first impressions are very positive.