Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-2600 review: Large-format photo printing is literally on a roll

I’ve been using Canon inkjet printers for work and pleasure for the last 30 years. I’ve tried other makes but Canon always wins me over for quality, reliability and dependability. I’ve worn various hats during this time in a professional capacity, as a technical author, journalist, copywriter and photographer. In the few weeks leading up to writing this, I’ve tested and reviewed the A3+ / 13-inch format Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-310 printer and the larger A2+ / 17-inch format Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1100 printer. Both are epic. Both deliver sumptuous print quality for photographs and artworks, and both are fed with precut sheets of paper. The PRO-2600 takes things up to a whole different level, running on rolls of paper up to 24 inches wide and enabling you to print at any length you like, with the length of the roll being the only limiting factor. Whichever way you look at it, the PRO-2600 is clearly one of the best large-format photo printers on the market.

Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-2600: Specifications

Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-2600: Price

Right then, here’s the tricky bit. The PRO-2600 costs $3,158 / £2,999 / AU$8,249. You’re going to have to be serious about creating gallery-quality prints for exhibitions or selling your photos to paying clients, if you’re going to spend that kind of money. Even so, the PRO-2600 is a whole lot of printer and ‘only’ costs as much as a single top-quality lens. Each of the 12 cartridges is available in three different capacities, suiting different requirements. For example, if you mainly print black & white, low-capacity color cartridges will suffice, and if you generally print on matte paper, you won’t need to go large on ‘photo black’ ink.

Prices for each cartridge are around $110 / £80 / AU$175 (160ml), $196 / £149 / AU$269 (330ml) and $333 / £276 / AU$369 (700ml). Sure, they’re all costly but, drop for drop, ink works out to between $0.48 / £0.39 / AU$0.53 and $0.69 / £0.50 / AU$1.09 per milliliter, which is very reasonable for an inkjet printer. Other options and service items, if and when you need them, include an optional lower roll feeder at $926 / £740, a user-replaceable maintenance cartridge at $105 / £65, a replacement print head at $699 / £540 and a replacement cutter blade at $100 / £155.

Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-2600: Design & Handling

Sometimes it’s good to think big. And sometimes it’s good to dream even bigger. In terms of logistics, it was no problem for Canon to deliver the PRO-310 and PRO-1100 printers to my door. For the PRO-2600 and PRO-4600 roll-fed printers, it made more sense for me to get in my car and drive to Canon’s Customer Experience Centre in Birmingham UK, which I can’t recommend highly enough. These are much bigger affairs, and are both freestanding printers that look very imposing, if not daunting, more like pieces of industrial machinery. The only real difference between the two is that the PRO-2600 takes rolls of paper up to 24 inches wide, and the PRO-4600 takes rolls of paper up to 44 inches wide.

Let’s start with the roll feeder itself. I have to admit that feeding paper into a printer from a roll caused me some concern but I needn’t have worried. As I’ve come to expect from imagePROGRAF printers, everything works simply, effectively and intuitively. Paper on a choice of rolls with 2-inch or 3-inch cores is automatically fed into the printer. Not only that, but the transport system includes automatic de-skewing, so you can be confident that everything’s going to line up properly and stay on the straight and (not so) narrow, even if you’re creating really long prints.

Something else that simplifies the paper feeding process is the printer’s uncanny ability to work out what paper you’re actually loading. The printer ‘knows’ a whole lot of different papers and has sensors that measures the exact thickness of the paper as well as its reflectivity, so it can recognize the make and model of paper stock. The printer displays its judgment call on paper type on its color touchscreen display panel and if it’s a correct match (which it’s pretty much bound to be) all you need to do is press ‘OK’ and get on with the job in hand. It’s a whole lot quicker and easier than trawling through endless lists of paper stock to select the right one manually.

You can also feed cut sheets of paper into the printer but rolls are the way forward. And if two are better than one, you can buy a secondary roll feeder as an optional extra. This is actually pretty clever. It not only allows you to have two of your favorite paper types on hand and ready to go, but you can alternatively use the secondary feeder as a take-up spool. For really long prints, this gives a handy option of rolling them up as they’re created, instead of sending them to the output basket.

The output basket itself is adjustable. I like that you can stash it away underneath so that it doesn’t take up any additional floorspace, or hang it off the front of the printer. The latter configuration makes created prints easier to get at, if you have the room. In between paper input and output, the paper transport system is incredibly precise, utilizing a suction system to ensure that the paper stays exactly on track. I’ve seen something similar in the PRO-1100, while both of the smaller PRO-1100 and PRO-310 have a similar automatic de-skew facility.

To keep a visual check on prints as the paper is passing through the machine, an upgrade over the previous version of the printer is a bank of LEDs that illuminates your print as it’s being made. It’s another nice touch that gives the reassurance of being able to easily satisfy yourself that everything’s going exactly to plan.

Naturally, paper is only one half of the story. The other is ink. The ink set is actually exactly the same as in the imagePROGRAF PRO-1100 desktop printer, which is great news. The next-generation Lucia Pro II inks represent a significant upgrade. First up, they boost the density and detail in blacks, dark blues and really deep shadows. Secondly, they include wax in their formulation that makes prints more robust and resistant to abrasion and scratches. Fade-resistance from exposure to indoor lighting also gets bumped up from 60 years to 200 years, making prints much more long-lasting if they’re going to be hung on a wall instead of being boxed for archiving. That’s a really important point if you’re making prints to sell to clients, that they’ll want to keep for a lifetime and maybe pass on to future generations.

The line-up includes 12 cartridges but only 11 are actual ‘inks’. One cartridge contains a ‘chroma optimizer’ which helps to deliver an even finish with uniform reflectivity and minimized bronzing when printing on glossy paper. That’s always a big challenge with pigment-based rather than dye-based inks. Better still, you can choose how the chroma optimizer is applied, either coating the whole print or enabling the printer to automatically select when and where to use it, to best effect, or to not use it at all.

The pigment ink set consists of matte black, photo black, grey, photo grey, cyan, photo cyan, magenta, photo magenta, yellow, red and blue. The matte black and photo black inks are for use with matte and glossy papers respectively, while different shades of grey help to enable a huge tonal range for black & white printing as well as further extending the color space or gamut for color printing.

In terms of placement, the 12 cartridges slot into place towards the top rear of the printer. Six cartridges go on the left side, the other six on the right. Again, enabling you to keep a quick and easy visual check on proceedings, the top covers are translucent and there’s an LED status lamp for each cartridge, which you can clearly see from a distance.

As I’ve mentioned, each of the 12 ink cartridges are available in three different sizes. They’ve basically small (160ml), medium (330ml) and large (700ml). As I’d expect, the cost per milliliter is slightly less as you go up in capacity. The more important aspect, to my mind, is that you can buy small cartridges of inks that you don’t use as much, making the printer more cost effective to run.

Especially when creating large format prints that use a lot of ink, there’s a danger of running on empty. That can actually be pretty disastrous. If any of the channels in the print head run dry, not only will you get a ruined print, but it can also destroy the print head, as it relies on the ink for liquid-cooling. I really like that the PRO-2600’s ink cartridges are ‘hot-swappable’. The ink from the cartridge feeds a tank that lies beneath. If you get a notification that a cartridge runs dry while you’re actually making a print, the underlying tank continues to deliver ink to the print head and you can replace the cartridge with a new one, while ongoing printing is uninterrupted.

For the ultimate in look and feel, professional and enthusiast photographers typically have their particular favorites when it comes to paper. There’s direct support for fine art media from top manufacturers like Hahnemühle, Canson and Awagami. Not only does the huge range of media from Canon and other brands give plenty of choice, but it’s supported by particularly good software. Top of the list is Canon’s Professional Print & Layout, which is available as a free download. It works as a standalone program or as a plug-in for Canon Digital Photo Professional and Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, suiting different workflow preferences. The software enables both soft proofing and hard proofing for different paper types, as well as giving you the option of applying individual adjustments to separate images that will be printed on the same page.

One of my favorite features of Professional Print & Layout is that you can create ‘pattern prints’, which include small versions of an image that have subtly different treatments of color rendition and tone. You can then pick your favorite version for making the final print. You can also save the settings for specific print jobs, in case you want to use them again, guaranteeing consistency in the results. And if you’re selling prints or just want to keep a tab on costs, the software can calculate the price of each print, based on the ink and paper used.

Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-2600: Performance

Ultimately, performance boils down to print quality. The 12-ink system delivers an incredible color space or gamut, with spectacular color rendition and tonal range. Mono prints look simply magnificent and in both cases, the printer does an exceptional job of reproducing really dense blacks and the deepest of shadows with immense clarity and detail. And the sheer amount of detail revealed in prints has to be seen to be believed, especially if you’re only used to seeing your photos on-screen or as small-format prints.

You can be confident that print quality isn’t a moveable feast. To ensure the utmost in consistency and that performance stays at its best, there’s a ‘color calibration’ option that you can run automatically from the Maintenance section of the onboard touchscreen menu, or from your computer’s printer driver. Helping to ease the load on your computer, the printer features its own 500GB hard drive. I think it’s also neat that you can switch your computer off altogether and print direct from a flash drive, as the printer has an easily accessible USB port for this exact option, conveniently close to the color touchscreen. For general connectivity, there’s a regular printer USB socket, plus Ethernet and Wi-Fi.

Speed can seem a bit irrelevant when you’re creating prints of the ultimate in quality, to last more than a lifetime. Even so, the PRO-2600 is pretty quick for a pigment-based printer. Typical times for an A1 (23.4x33.1-inch) photo print on coated media are about 1m 40s in standard quality mode, and 3m 15s in high quality mode. For glossy paper, it’s just over 3 minutes in standard mode and 5 minutes in the high quality setting.

One facet of performance that can be frustrating with cut-sheet photo printers is that the size of the paper might well not match the aspect ratio of your actual image. The roll-fed approach puts that right, enabling you to create bordered or borderless prints with exactly the right length to match the width of the paper. And that goes for freeform panoramic images as well. There’s also no need to worry about having to physically cut your print to length either, as the printer features its own cutter that takes care of everything automatically.

I’ve always found that reliability is a big factor in the performance of any printer. Blocked nozzles in the print head can be a major pain, resulting in feint lines that ruin a print. And when you’re talking large-format prints, that’s a lot of waste in terms of money, time and effort. Then there’s the not inconsiderable cost of wasting ink if you have to keep flushing nozzles in the print head to unblock them. I’ve found Canon printers to be much more reliable than various other makes over the years. Canon's ‘FINE’ print heads are particularly resistant to the problem, as there’s significant redundancy in the number of nozzles and the technology can automatically detect blocked nozzles in real time and switch to adjacent nozzles if and when necessary.

Sample prints

By way of example, the following gallery contains a few prints that I actually made with the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1100 on Canon Premium Fine Art Smooth paper. I’ve included them here as the complete set of 12 Lucia PRO II inks is identical in both printers, as is the resolution of the print head. The images shown are photos of the finished prints, which themselves were created from digital photos taken on the Dorset coast in the UK, under very moody and dramatic skies. There are some really deep blues and blacks in the images and the sky in one photo in particular is almost completely black. They’re therefore a good test of the printer’s ability to recreate really dense blacks, dark blues and ultra-deep shadows, a major plus point of the new inks.

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Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-2600: Verdict

I’m seldom lost for words. After all, I do words (and pictures) for a living. Even so, I think the quality and scale of photographic prints from the PRO-2600 are something you have to see to believe. Sadly, the scale and cost of the printer itself are factors that put it out of reach of most photographers. However, if you’ve got the money and the floorspace, this is a printer that can deliver the most sumptuous image quality for both color and black & white photos, on both glossy and matte paper as well as a rich and diverse range of fine art media. And if you’ve got a 45+ megapixel camera, this printer will do it full justice.

Alternatives

The Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-4600 is basically the same printer as the PRO-2600, but upsized to accommodate paper rolls up to 44 inches wide. Naturally, it’s rather more expensive at $4,997 / £5,850 / AU$14,849 but uses exactly the same cartridge in all three size options.

The Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1100 is a smaller, desktop printer that takes cut sheets up to A2+ / 17-inch width. It uses the same set of 12 Lucia PRO II inks and, drop for drop, ink costs are pretty similar despite its lower-capacity 80ml cartridges. Panoramic prints are available of up to 3.27m / 10.75ft in length.