CANON PIXMA pro-10s

£535/$700 The same but different, the Pro-10s printer has pigment inks aplenty

At a glance, the PIXMA Pro-10s looks identical to the Pro-100s, apart from the badge on the front. It’s different under the covers, however, ditching its sibling’s eight dye-based ink cartridges and replacing them with ten pigment inks. One of the cartridges is a ‘Chroma Optimizer’, which provides a smooth finish on glossy paper. Of the other nine, you get the standard six colours for photo printing, plus red and grey inks, and both ‘photo’ black and matte black, for printing on glossy and matte media respectively.

Unlike the Epson SC P600, the Canon printer has individual channels in the print head for both photo and matte black inks, so there are no issues of wasting time and ink when swapping between media types. The ink cost per millilitre works out the cheapest of any printer on test, bar the Epson Ecotank printer. In the UK, however, this pro-grade Canon A3+ printer is actually cheaper to buy than the Epson A4 printer, which puts things into perspective somewhat. As with the Pro-100s, photo paper and other specialist media can be fed from the front or rear of the printer.

performance

Excellent output quality combines superb accuracy for colour prints and fabulous definition for black & white photo prints, without any unwanted colour casts. Results are wonderfully non-reflective on matte photo paper and other specialist media, while printing on glossy paper looks smoother than with any other pigment-based printer that we’ve ever used.