Canon Pixma PRO-200 review: A phenomenal A3 photo printer

With the Pixma PRO-200, Canon has taken photo printing to the next level. It’s a large printer, capable of printing borderless photos at sizes up to A3+. However, the prints it produced as I was testing it simply knocked my socks off.

If you’re a professional or enthusiastic photographer, looking to print copies of your favourite photos, we doubt you’ll be disappointed with it, as long as you have a desk large enough to accommodate its girth.

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Canon Pixma PRO-200 review: What do you get for the money?

The Canon Pixma PRO-200 is a true behemoth. It’s not actually that heavy for its size, weighing 14.1kg, but its 639 x 379 x 200mm (WDH) dimensions expand out to a whopping 639 x 837 x 416mm when you open out its paper trays. If you’re considering a purchase, make sure you factor in the price of a second desk. Once it’s opened up, the rear paper feed can hold up to 100 sheets.

The key reason behind its enormity is its ability to print on A3+ paper. It also uses eight cartridges at a time: the usual four CMYK colours, along with grey, light grey, photo cyan and photo magenta. It prints at a resolution of 4,800 x 2,400dpi.

There are plenty of connection options, which will come in handy if you’re buying this for sharing with other people in an office or studio setting. You can connect directly from a single PC using the USB option, there’s Wi-Fi you can use to connect from any Wi-Fi enabled PC or mobile device and it has an Ethernet port, so you can attach it to a wired network.

Photography enthusiasts might miss the fact that it doesn’t have a scanner built in, especially given the size and it can’t duplex automatically, either. However, it’s designed for printing glorious photos, not churning out office documents, so if you’re going to miss the ability to print two-sided, it’s probably not the right printer for you.

Canon Pixma PRO-200 review: Is it easy to use?

Setting up and connecting the Canon Pixma PRO-200 is as simple as it is with Canon’s consumer models and, in my opinion, is most easily done via the setup website. Here you choose your printer from a list and you’re guided through the process with as much (or as little) hand holding as you need. There’s a CD included in the box, however, if your laptop or PC is old enough to still have a CD-ROM drive.

The printer has a 3in colour screen, controlled with a joypad-style bank of direction buttons, with an OK button at the centre. I would have expected to see a touchscreen on a printer of this price but it’s still reasonably easy to control. With no scanner or copier functions to control and no USB or memory card slots to print from, you only really need to use the screen to keep an eye on all those ink cartridges.

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Canon Pixma PRO-200 review: What’s print quality like?

The Canon Pixma PRO-200 is all about the print quality. Every photo we printed on this device came out perfect. Black and other dark colours look deep and rich, skin tones of all shades look natural, and colours are bright. Fine details came out looking pin sharp, too.

Whether I printed on Canon’s own A3+ paper or cheap 6x4in photo paper, the results were just wonderful. I tested it with a broad range of photos, from bright colourful prints to misty landscapes requiring subtle colour transitions, and it printed everything exceptionally. If you’re looking for a printer that can create superb quality photos at any size, this really is the one for you.

There’s nothing wrong with the mono and mixed text and colour prints it produced in our tests either, but it’s just not what the printer is designed to do.

READ NEXT: Canon Pixma MG5750 review

Canon Pixma PRO-200 review: What about speed and running costs?

However, let’s not pretend that such luxury isn’t pricey. With a price approaching the £500 mark, it’s expensive to buy in the first place and it’s pricey to run as well.

Canon only quotes its cartridge capacities in terms of A3+ and 6 x 4in photos, which makes sense given the type of printer it is, and because the cartridges serve different purposes they have varying yields. The light grey cartridge, for example, has a yield of 139 A3+ photos while the cyan cartridge can only squeeze out 51.

This makes it difficult to compare directly with other printers we’ve reviewed. However, doing the maths of dividing the cost of each cartridge (£18.49 if purchased direct from Canon) by its capacity and adding the results together, I worked out a per photo cost of £2.19 for an A3+ print, and 33p for a 6 by 4in. This is pricey, so there’s no way you’d want to use it as your everyday printer.

The results of the print speed tests we performed on the printer further back this up. The Pixma Pro-200 outputs mono A4 pages at a glacial 2.5ppm, while our mixed colour document printed at 1.6ppm. This is slow for an inkjet printer.

As you might expect, however, it’s a lot nippier at photo printing, despite the amazing quality of the prints. It produced six 6 x 4in photos in just under nine minutes, which is around average for an inkjet. It took 4mins 52secs to print our two test 8 x 10 images, and 3mins 10secs to print an A3 photo.

READ NEXT: Canon Pixma TS6350 review

Canon Pixma PRO-200 review: Should you buy it?

I’ve given this printer a five-star rating because it produces phenomenal photo prints, both large and small, and if that’s important to you or your business it’s definitely the printer to choose. Image enthusiasts who end up with one of these in their office won’t be disappointed.

If you want something that’s cheaper and more versatile and can still print on A3, we’d recommend the Epson Photo HD XP-15000. It’s better value if you want to use the same device to print both text and photos.Buy now from Canon