CANON PIXMA PRO-200

£449/$599 This A3+/13-inch dye-based photo printer is epic for photo quality output on glossy and lustre papers

Canon’s PIXMA PRO-100S had long been our favourite A3+/13-inch pro-grade printer for creating photo prints on glossy and lustre papers. Running on eight dye-based inks, including black, grey and light grey, it delivered sumptuously smooth glossy prints with immaculate colour rendition and very good tonal expression for black & white photographic images. The replacement PRO-200 brings a number of improvements and enhancements, similar to those of the IMAGEPROGRAF PRO-300 compared with the older PIXMA PRO-10S pigment-based model.

A headline upgrade is that the PRO-200 has a new and improved range of inks that deliver a greater colour space, superior vibrancy and deeper reds, blues and blacks. Paper handling is intuitive, as in the PRO-300 on test, with an upright rear feeder and a secondary manual feeder that enables custom print lengths of up to 39 inches (99.1cm). Other similarities with the PRO-300 are the addition of a 3-inch colour LCD screen and compatibility with Canon’s excellent Professional Print & Layout software, available as a free download. The printers are also fully compatible with a range of top-quality fine art media from the likes of Canson and Hahnemühle.

Performance

Print speeds from this dye-based printer are faster than from the pigment-based PRO-300 model. As is often the case, the difference in print quality between standard and highest quality modes can look fairly negligible. Even in standard mode, the PRO-200 is simply the best in the group for glossy photo paper, but the PRO-300 has the edge for black & white images, especially on matte media.