Canon PIXMA PRO-100 Color Professional Inkjet Photo Printer and Canon Ink CLI-42 8 PK Value Pack Ink

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First of all I want to dispel some myths and answer some questions about the printer. It has two (2) paper feed sections, one that is sort of on top, you can put about ¼ of a ream of paper in there and one that folds open from the back of the printer that is single sheet feeding for products that are thicker and don’t bend well. Next it works fine with Windows 10 and the software runs just fine. It takes it a while to warm up, that is typical of all top end printers, don’t shut it off ever and you will be in good shape and it will save you some ink. Also for those that are unsuspecting this printer is massive, you should expect that with so many ink tanks and 13” wide feeding, but it is huge if you have never seen it in person. Ok, now down to the nitty gritty. Setup time from box opened to my first print was about 45 min including installing software and so forth. The profiles for canon papers are not that bad depending on the paper, I tried Luster and Platinum Pro from there line. Luster was not that great, Platinum Pro was better. I also tried some Red River papers last night, I like them better than canon paper and there profiles are better. It feeds my 250gsm Aurora Art paper from the back feed with no problems. Print quality its self was better than my local Walgreens print center so long as you set it to fine, about on par if you set it to normal. Colors where great, purples and blues popped nicely when I was printing some MLP stuff for my daughter, reds and organ look nice too. Black and white is much better than a standard inkjet, but yes the Pro-10 and Pro-1 make better black and white prints (had a friend make me a couple from his studio to compare). Print time was not bad for a high end, on fine setting I hit print and go make a cup of tea, by the time I’m back the page is done. Considering I have some friends with printers that take 5 min a page, I’m pleased with the speed. The good and bad of what is in the box. Well the power cord is a good length and the documentation is not bad. The USB cord they give you is a joke, it is short, very short, only slightly longer than the printer is wide. I have not tried the tray for printing on a CD. The packaging was good and secure. Ok let’s talk value. When I ordered I was arguing between a good price point and the all-out performance of a Pro-1. I don’t print that much, some photos for my cube at my day job, some of my semi-pro photos that I sell on line and a little here and there for family. As such I did not feel that I could justify the price of a Pro-1 and figured I would try the Pro-100 and see if it met my needs. My needs are more than met. For the price point the Pro-100 cannot be beat. I am more than pleased with the purchase and with the rebate it is even better. Word on the rebate. You need to send a full copy of the receipt (showing order number and that you paid), yes Amazon is an authorized retailer, it is a good idea to pre-register the rebate and send the whole set of bar code and SN on the outside of the box and it runs fairly smooth. DO NOT send the upc on the inner flap, DO NOT peel the label off the cardboard, send the cut out cardboard. Hope that was helpful.

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Wonderful printer, but it was difficult getting set up. Love the photo quality, and doesnt seem to use too much ink. Have printed at least 30 8.5x11" photos, and 10 13x19" photos, with about half of my ink levels left.

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After 10 months the print head permanently clogged at the cyan cartridge. I bought a "Print Head Hospital" kit for $29 which was not able to free up the clog after many, many applications including overnight soaks. The end result is I have no cyan when I print though the printer still willingly prints black and white documents, but forget photos or color. Now heres the real problem. Replacement print heads for this model are almost impossible to locate. Im bidding on one right now on eBay and my bid at this moment is way over $100 and theres hours to go. Many people are bidding. Or, you can buy a print head at the going price at $200+.if you find one. Note: you can now buy a whole new exact replacement Pro 100 printer, the entire printer for $278--yes, the entire printer new for $78 more than the print head. The print head is the most vulnerable part of these printers. Canon Pro 100 print heads are really hard to unclog and are outrageously over priced. Unclogging is a messy nightmare so its like winning the lottery if you are successful.

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The Pixma Pro-100 is a good printer. Its large and weighty, but it prints up to 19" x 13". You should expect a printer with this capability to be large. You may ask, "do I want to print 19x13?" At this price, why not?! The price is good. Further, having the option to print that large is nice, better than having to run off to a copy center when you do want it. The 8 ink cartridges are great to have. I print black and white and having the extra gray is a nice feature. The Pixma Pro 100 is designed for those with the need or desire to print not only in color, but in true black and white. Im running this on both Sierra OS and Windows 10 and have no issues. My set up time, from box to fully operating, was 40 minutes. Thats not unreasonable as you are unpacking, removing security tape, checking for damage, reading the manual and activating. The software installed without issue. I always suggest looking for firmware and software updates. This is because software updates may be released after the device is packaged. Im using Canon Luster Pro and Canon Paper Plus Semi-Gloss 13"x19". Both have done well. There are two paper feeds, one on top, and one in the back. The 13x19s I printed took a few minutes, but I was busy preparing the next job, its no issue. The power cord is a great length, but the USB cable is rather short. I think thats because Canon assumes youll go wireless. I prefer cabling as it ensures no disruptions in the printing. I have a 6 cable I use. Quality of prints, Im extremely pleased! Take a look at the photos I included. The black and white photos are from digital images. I found the consistency of ink flow and distribution of colors was good. This is a great printer with flexibility and I recommend it.

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I LOVE this printer. I use it to print my artwork and family photos for my home. The quality of the prints is wonderful. Ive experimented with both the Canon Luster paper and the Canon Photo Plus Glossy II paper. The combination of the art prints on the Luster paper has been really great. Now this printer is incredibly heavy and when you receive it warns that you need two people to carry it. I wasnt able to carry it, but my husband can manage it by himself. Before purchasing this printer I researched into other options and it seemed to be the best option I could find for professional quality large format prints for a really reasonable price. In my opinion, the only negative (apart from the weight) is that the ink is expensive at about $100-120 full set of ink.

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I usually wait a couple of months before reviewing an electronic item. But I couldn’t wait on this one. I am a casual printer user (if there is such a thing). I finally discovered “print to PDF” so document printing has almost become a thing of the past, though I still need to print documents from time to time. I print photos very rarely (and I’m sure that is because I’ve never had a printer that did a decent job printing photos). Without further ado: This printer is HUGE so be ready. It is also heavy. To me, this is *not* a negative. It is an absolute work of art. Beautifully designed and obviously meticulously manufactured to be a high quality, long lasting product. Every door and latch fits like a glove and opens and closes so “perfectly” it’s hard to describe without experiencing it for yourself. Set-up on my Windows 10 system went smoothly without any confusing errors or anything. (I used a USB connection). Unpacking and installing the print head and ink went without a hitch (for the most part… I did have two colors of ink that leaked when I removed the orange cap. I am assuming this was because we have had sub-zero temps and the inks probably froze and thawed during transport). The instructions seemed pretty cut and dry and simple to follow. In all it took about an hour to do the unboxing, installing, setup etc. And then… it happened… I printed my first ever “real” photo on a “real” photo printer. I was (and am) literally in awe. It is the most beautiful home printed photo I have ever seen. I am in love with my Canon PIXMA. I can’t believe I got this thing for 150$ (after a 200$ rebate). Did I mention it also prints documents? Hehe. It does. And it does so perfectly (if not a little more slowly than the 70$ “all-in-ones” I’ve been using since they hit the market). I will *never* go back to an all-in-one cheapie again. Now that I know the difference, I would *gladly* pay full price for a printer of this caliber. It is worth every penny. I’m not sure how much ink this will go through, but I was happy to find that individual inks are around 17$ a piece (compared to the 40$ a piece I had to pay for genuine inks for my all-in-one). My only complaint so far is that the software that comes with the printer (My Image Garden) and some other “bloatware” as it might be called looks out of date and is very limiting regarding customization (for instance, it won’t let you specify which folder it looks for photos in so you have to literally go through your entire file system in their software). Hopefully this printer will last many years. If it does I will consider it an investment that has paid for itself in terms of enjoyment and quality. If you are looking for what professional critics have termed an “entry level” dedicated photo printer than look no further. I can’t say enough positive about this PIXMA so far. Go for it!! Thanks for reading my review. :-) I have attached a photo of the first picture I printed with the PIXMA. Keep in mind the photo you will see does no justice to what it really looks like in person.

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This printer has become a money pit for me. After doing two months of solid work printing game design components for me, the printhead became clogged. Numerous attempts at cleaning and deep cleaning cycles didnt work. Taking the existing printhead out and trying to clean it myself didnt work. A brand new printhead replacement went in and the same issue is there: half the inks wont print and the new printhead was saturated with ink on the side that wasnt printing when attempting the test page. Frustrated doesnt begin to cover it.

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Im having a lot of trouble with this printer. Most of my work is printing portraits of children. Ive found that the Canon Pixma Pro-100 has problems with highlights that are even the slightest bit over exposed. The printer cant handle the smooth transition from flesh color to white. Instead, I get a magenta halo around the white zone. My very old Canon i9900 never had this problem. The Pixma also seems to give pink flesh tones an unattractive jaundiced hue. I also had problems with the on-screen manual. There was an error that caused the printer to flash an orange warning light 10 times. When I tried looking up what this meant the manual jumped from 9 to 11 flashes without mentioned what 10 flashes meant. Also, when I try to do a manual print head alignment and follow the manuals instructions, nothing happens. No adjustment options are provided. Finally, the images seem to print out soft. This is the opposite of the i9900, which printed images sharper than what was on screen. Im seriously considering returning it. UPDATE: After printing fifty 8 x 10 prints Ive found the following: 1. Image sharpness is still a little soft. I have to over sharpen then deal with sharpening halos. 2. Printing is very quiet, but the printer is almost constantly grinding away between, before and after printing. It sounds like the printer is locked into constant cleaning cycles. It stops for a couple of minutes from time to time then starts up again. Im concerned all this cleaning, if thats what it is, is going to eat up a lot of ink. 3. After fifty 8 x 10 portraits of caucasian faces against a dark blue background, the first ink to run out was gray. The next lowest ink was photomagenta. The rest are only half empty so it doesnt seen to use too much ink. 4. Prints come out darker, redder and yellower than what appears on my monitor. I found resetting the defaults to be very difficult, but then Im not a printer expert. In the end I found that in Photoshop +20 brightness, -20 red and -20 yellow produces a picture that looks like the monitor image before these changes are applied. 5. I printed two copies of the same image, one right after the other and the second one came out noticeably darker. 6. In spite of all these problems Ive decided to keep the printer. Im getting acceptable results and the fact is that every printer is going to have its issues. I could pay a lot more and still have problems. Modern printers are not plug-and-play devices if you want to get good results. Unfortunately to do so you have to be willing to put in many hours of study and work. After a year with this printer I have come to the conclusion I hate it. I hate that Canon sacrificed the red and green inks in the old I9900 printer in favor of light and medium gray. Because of this I have yet to get a good red out of this machine. It always comes out orange. I hate that it runs so many cleaning cycles. I hate that instead of running a cleaning cycle when I turn it on, it waits until I request a print, forcing me to wait two minutes while it grinds away. I cant return it because too much time has gone by, but Im looking for a new printer to replace it.

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Im a very long time Epson customer. As in roughly 25 years as a design business. However, after going through 3 $800 Epsons in 3 years, enough was enough as I decided to give Canon a go. I mean seriously, an $800 printer that cant make it literally 3 weeks past the warranty expiration... and customer services best effort is to offer me 15% off a new one if I buy direct from them? Adios Epson. Rant over, on to talking about Canon. Im very happy with this printer and their customer service. Had a glitch during the initial setup, where you have to restart the printer to recognize its a new printer, with new head and new inks. Error message basically says "printer is damaged beyond repair... return to sender." Thats a little distressing when you need it to work for business that day. Tech support immediately sorted it out and waited with me on the phone while we downloaded and installed a full collection of new drivers/software. Not really required since that wasnt the issue. Just good customer service. Print quality is excellent and color matching was excellent from the first print out of Photoshop. (Photoshop manages colors, used the profile for the Canon paper I was using. Printed my Color test page with full CMYK bars and gradations. Im comfortable using it for proofing before sending to press.) Also the color fidelity is good coming out of InDesign, which was a pleasant surprise. I was having to export as PDFs then print from Photoshop to get the Epson to have reasonable color. Also it did a good job printing out of Preview on Mac as well as printing images from Google Docs on Chrome. That last one I was really surprised by. Ive gotten really used to having to take everything into Photoshop with Epson. Being able to just print from whatever app Im in is Very bizarre. Bottom Line: Adios Epson - Im a Canon customer now.

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First, some background: I am a digital artist. I judge a printer on two main criteria: how well does the printer match the picture on my monitor and the color gamut of the printer. I have spent a lot of effort to figure out how to match screen to print. For a monitor, I use an NEC PA271W calibrated using NECs X-Rite based sensor. I calibrate the monitor to a color balance of 4000K. I view the print next to the monitor under a 4000K Solux lamp (50W low voltage halogen). Using my old printer, a Canon iP6700D, I can get excellent screen to print match using Canon glossy papers (Photo Paper Plus Glossy) and standard Canon printer profiles for those papers. I use 4000K color temperature because I have found (using the X-Rite sensor) that my house is around 4000K on the interior during the day and is in the 3200-3300K range at night (artificial light). I find the 4000K screen color balance makes the screen look like the prints when hung on the wall. This all has taken me years to figure out. I also demand a high level of quality and I am very sensitive to color shifts. Now for the Canon PRO-100 printer. I first printed on stock Canon papers using standard Canon profiles: Platinum Pro, Semi-Gloss, Luster, and Photo Paper Plus Glossy. I was somewhat disappointed with the results--they were OK. I found the screen match wasnt as good as with my older Canon iP6700D printer. So, I started to print grey scales (neutral, warm, cool, 21 points each). I found that for all the papers, the results were similar: highlights were significantly too dark, midtones were light and dark tones were light. I found that overall prints felt dark. I speculate this is because of the compressed contrast and especially missing highlights. I now was thinking I would need to make custom profiles for these papers---I assumed that the issue was with the stock Canon profiles, but couldnt be sure it wasnt a general printer issue. (I found these problems surprising given my past experience with Canon papers and profiles). So, I tried some 3rd party papers. I tried 11 Hahnemuehle and Canson Infinity papers. What a difference! I got outstanding screen matches and color gamuts with the following papers: Hahnemuehle: Fine Art Pearl (my personal favourite), Photo Rag Satin, Photo Rag Pearl, Fine Art Baryta. Canson Infinity: BFK Rives, Platine Fibre Rag (very nice), Photo Satin Premium PC, PhotoArt HD Canvas. In each case I use the stock paper profiles for the PRO-100 supplied by Hahnemuehle and Canson Infinity. The PRO-100 definitely produced lovely prints with better screen matching and color gamut than my old Canon iP6700D. The general color tone was a significant improvement also. So, in summary, the PRO-100 is an excellent printer when used with high quality profiles. For Canon paper, the stock Canon profiles are subpar and I would not recommend them.

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