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 iP5200 has a Bottom Plate Cleaning option. There is also an option for aligning the heads or checking the print nozzles. You can 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.

I always enable the Preview option as it can save you from wasting a sheet of expensive Photo Paper Pro if you have a setting wrong. As you can see; the paper size, paper type and page layout are shown on the left. The preview image itself shows if it has been properly oriented and sized for the selected media and whether it's bordered or borderless.

Steve's Conclusion

For everyday text and color document printing tasks the Pixma iP5200 is an excellent printer and very fast. It's also very quiet and the built-in duplexer (two-sided printing) is great for web page or document printouts and saves lots of paper. It's also great for printing double-sided photo albums, sales flyers, catalogs or whatever. The top and bottom paper trays are a real convenience, use the auto sheet feeder on the top for plain paper and the covered cassette for photo paper where it's kept away from dust and etc. What I do is put my most-used 4×6-inch photo paper in the cassette and then drop in the bigger, letter-size sheets of photo paper in the upper feed when needed. 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.

Canon's photo printers are still the fastest of the fast.   The iP5200 cranks out 4×6" borderless prints in about 36 seconds when connected to the computer. When connected to a camera in Pictbridge mode it makes the same 4×6" print from a 7-megapixel image in 1:33.   It makes a full-size 8.5×11" borderless glossy print in the highest quality possible in just 2:10 from the computer -- via PictBridge it took 3:15.

The iP5200 is another of Canon's 5-color printers that leaves me wondering why I own and use the 8-color i9900. When I see just how good the photo prints look when using only the three primary colors (cyan, magenta and yellow), I don't know why I need those other ink colors, or the added expense. With the 1-picoliter size ink droplets the prints are virtually grainless. I can only visually see imperfections after scanning a print at 600dpi and then zooming in really close. Holding a 4×6" print in my hand and getting it as close as possible, I can see nothing to complain about at all. For the average to the hypercritical user I am sure that this printer will satisfy your photo printing as well as your everyday printing needs. The color is simply brilliant, the prints last and you'll certainly not be waiting for this printer to do its job.

The only real complaint that I have with Canon printers in general is the lack of support for printing CD/DVD discs here in N. America. The same printers are sold in Europe and those can print on discs as well as paper media. This didn't used to be such a big deal but now, nearly everyone has a CD or DVD burner in their computer and could really use this capability. I know it has something to do with licensing, doesn't it always? The Epson printers can do it so why not the Canons?