The Effects page lets turns your photo into a simulated color illustration, slide the lever to increase or decrease the effect. You can also create a monochrome effect like Sepia, Pink, Blue, Green or select a custom color. The Vivid Photo option enhances the green and blue colors and contrast and may be too much for some images. You can also enable or disable the Image Optimizer or Photo Optimizer PRO enhancements which help produce better enlargements from lower resolution images. The Photo Noise Reduction option helps reduce speckle noise often found in blue areas such as the sky. It has two settings: Normal and Strong.

The Profiles page lets you load, create or save custom sets of printer parameters for the type of printing jobs that you do frequently.

The Maintenance page lets you clean the print heads with options for a regular cleaning cycle or a "deep" cleaning cycle for really clogged heads. Because of the lower paper cassette, the iP6000D also has a Bottom Plate Cleaning option. There is also an option for aligning the heads or checking the print nozzles. You can also set the Auto Power Off time, Custom Settings and the Quiet Mode. From here you can also start the Status Monitor (see next frame.)

The Status Monitor shows you visibly the level of ink in each of the ink tanks. When one of the tanks is low the Status Monitor will pop-up to alert you. The low tank(s) will have a yellow exclamation mark over it to let you know that it needs to be replaced soon. The ink warning first comes on when there is still some ink remaining so you won't run out in the middle of a printout and waste a sheet of costly photo paper.

Here's what a "low" ink tank looks like. The chamber on the left side is full of ink when the tank is new. As you can see it drained the left chamber completely and the foam-filled side that feeds the head is half empty. Unlike those opaque Epson and HP cartridges, you can actually see the ink level thanks to the use of clear plastic

I always enable the Preview option (found on the Main driver page), this is displayed just before the printer begins to actually print. Here you can visually verify your image cropping, orientation, paper size, media type, paper source and the printing type (borderless / bordered) -- before accidentally wasting a sheet of expensive photo paper because a driver setting was incorrect.

Steve's Conclusion

PIXMA 101 - Canon has introduced four new PIXMA photo inkjet printers for 2004, see the press release for more info. In a nutshell the difference is the iP4000/4000R is a 5-color speed demon (iP4000R has 802.11g wireless capability) it also has both USB and parallel port so it's Windows 95 and NT compatible, the iP5000 has 1-picoliter size ink droplets for grain-free photos, the iP6000D is a 6-color printer with standalone capabilities and the iP8500 is an 8-color narrow carriage version of the top of the line i9900 printer.

From high-resolution photos to everyday text and color printing tasks, the Pixma iP6000D is an excellent printer. It's reasonably priced ($179 suggested retail), quiet and versatile. The built-in duplexer (two-sided printing) is great for web page or document printouts and saves lots of wasted paper. It's also great for printing 2-sided professional looking photo albums, sales flyers, catalogs or whatever. The dual top and bottom paper trays are very handy. Use the auto sheet feeder on the top for plain paper and put your photo paper in the lower cassette where it's kept safe inside of the printer and away from dust, moisture and etc. If you're on a printing spree, both the top and bottom trays can be loaded with up to 150 sheets of plain paper each and the printer can be set to auto-switch trays when one goes empty.

The big attraction of the iP6000D is its computer-free printing capabilities. Direct printing from most popular flash memory cards is quick and easy with preview, adjustment and cropping on the big 2.5-inch color monitor. It's also PictBridge compatible, most current 2004 digicams can be plugged into the front USB port for direct printing from the camera. And finally, there's an IrDA (infrared) receiver port on the front that allows compatible cellphones to wirelessly transmit JPEG images for printing. (Sorry, I don't have one of these phones so I couldn't tell you how well it worked or how long it took.)

The printing quality is on par with Canon's previous 6-color printers (the i960 and i9100) and uses exactly the same Canon ink tanks. I hate to sound like a broken record but, the prints from the iP6000D are the equal of anything that you'd get from the best photo inkjet printers. The 4x6", 5x7" and letter-size prints on Canon Photo Paper Pro glossy media look like professional photo lab prints. But, as with all injket-produced prints, they will fade faster than dye sub or wet-processed photo prints.

Not as speedy as the PIXMA iP4000, the iP6000D is still a good performer. Here's some average print times using the same 3-megapixel JPEG image, Canon Photo Paper Pro glossy media and the different printing modes.

As you can see, the print times are very similar no matter which input source was used. This speaks volumes for the printer's internal processing power, older model printers used to take almost twice as long to print directly from a memory card as they did from a computer. I also noted little difference in the print times between glossy and matte media types.