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 iP6700D 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.

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

For printing high-resolution photos as well as every day text and color printing tasks, the Pixma iP6700D is an excellent choice. It's reasonably priced (US$199 suggested), quiet and very versatile. The built-in duplexer is ideal for web page or document printouts and saves lots of wasted paper. And it's great for printing double-sided photo album pages, sales flyers, catalogs or whatever. The dual paper trays are very handy. Use the auto sheet feeder on the top for plain paper and put photo paper in the cassette so it's safe from dust, moisture and etc. Need to do a lot of printing? Both the top and bottom trays can be loaded with up to 150 sheets of plain paper each and the printer can auto-switch trays when one goes empty.

One the major features of the iP6700D is its computer-free printing capabilities. Direct printing from most flash memory cards is quick and easy with preview, adjustment and cropping on the tilting 3.5-inch color monitor. PictBridge compatibility lets most digicams direct print from the camera using the standard USB download cable. The IrDA (infrared) receiver on the front 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 print quality is better than some of Canon's previous 6-color printers and is the equal of the very best photo inkjet printers. The 4x6", 5x7" and letter-size prints on Canon Photo Paper Pro glossy media rival professional photo lab prints. The Microfine ink droplets can be as small as 1-picoliter resulting in up to 9600 x 2400 dpi resolution which means very realistic facial colors, shading and tonal variations. The Chromalife 100 inks resist fading and improve resistance to heat and humidity. Canon claims a 10 year environmental gas fastness for photographs that are exposed to the open air, 30 years lightfastness and up to 100 years for photos stored in an album.

Test print times using a 6-megapixel JPEG image and Canon Photo Paper Pro glossy media. These are actual "click to drop" times meaning the timer starts when we clicked the Print button and stopped when the paper dropped in the tray.

(Pentium P4 / Windows XP computer with USB 2.0 high speed. Kodak C663 camera used for PictBridge tests.)