Canon Pixma Pro-10 review

The Canon Pixma Pro-10 is the mid-priced model in Canon’s outstanding range of professional A3+ inkjet photo and fine art printers. It takes ten ink cartridges with separate matt and photo black pigments, the usual cyan, magenta and yellow, paler photo cyan and photo magenta cartridges, red and grey inks as well as a chroma optimiser cartridge. This last cartridge coats your photos in a clear protective layer, which negates the tendency of pigmented inks to reflect light oddly and gives your photos a smooth, glossy finish by filling in the microscopic gaps between droplets of ink.

The addition of a grey ink tank means the Pro-10 is fairly well equipped when it comes to printing high-quality black and white photos, although it lacks the more expensive Canon Pro-1 and Epson Stylus Photo R3000’s extra pale grey tanks, which makes those printers the first choice for black and white photographers who have the money to spend.

The printer uses colour profiles to ensure the best possible results on different paper types, and we were impressed by its natural rendering of subtle colour variations. You can also fine-tune these ICC profiles to produce images that look exactly the way you want them. In common with most other professional and semi-professional pigment printers, the Pro-10’s prints lack the hyper-vivid oversaturation that’s common to many consumer photo printers, but this can result in photos that look a little dull unless you take advantage of tweakable print profiles or post-produce your photos in an appropriate manner. However, even at default settings, we loved the fine detail and broad colour range of our prints.

Print speeds are a bit slower than the printers’ more expensive sibling, the Canon Pro-1, and quite a lot slower than the similarly-priced Epson Stylus Photo R2000. An A3 print emerged in ten minutes and 35 seconds, while six 6x4in prints took ten minutes and five seconds and two 10x8in photos took 15 minutes and 10 seconds.

You can connect the printer to your PC via USB, Wi-Fi or Ethernet network connections. Unlike Epson’s A3 printers, the Pro-10 lacks a screen, so you’ll have to use the configuration utility on the supplied CD to set up your wireless connection via USB. With the printer connected to your network, you can also use Android and iOS mobile devices to print to it via Canon’s apps.

Although the Pro-10 has only two fewer ink cartridges than the Pro-1, it’s significantly cheaper to run. If you include the price of Canon’s top-grade Platinum Pro photo paper, a 6x4in print costs 34p (5p without the paper), an A4 print costs 89p and an A3 print £2.11. The various cartridges will last for between 165 6x4in photos, in the case of the clear colour optimiser, and 710 photos in the case of Magenta. Most are rated to last for around 350 6x4in prints, although the matt black and red cartridges are primarily used in plain paper printing.

The printer has a 150 sheet rear-loading paper tray. Unfortunately, like most of the current generation of Canon A3 printers, it’s not very friendly when it comes to thinner papers. It can handle all sorts of thick photo paper, fine art paper and card stock, but cheap photocopier paper doesn’t agree with it at all, causing paper jams which, although easy to clear, can be annoying. It’s not really expected that anyone will use an A3+ photo printer for documents, but if you do need to quickly print off a receipt, its plain text quality is fantastic. We had to switch to 100gsm inkjet paper to get around the paper feeding issue, though, and plain paper A4 print speeds are slow, which makes this a poor choice for document printing.

At £500, the Pro-10 isn’t as painfully expensive as the Canon Pro-1, but it’s only a little cheaper than Epson’s excellent R3000, which has better black and white printing capabilities – worth bearing in mind if your photography leans that way. If you’re more into colour, then the vast majority of users will do as well with the cheaper Canon Pro-100, our Best Buy winner, which costs less to run and around £125 less to buy.