Bye bye bad prints: Canon PIXMA matches your screen

While the number of people who print their digital photos may be dwindling, chances are that you still get a touch peeved when the print rolls off and it looks nothing like it did on your screen.

Weaker blues, less contrast, or pinkish black and whites: you know the drill.

Canon has been working on a fix to these problems, aiming to make the printer the very thing that worries about colour correction.

In the past decade or so of photography, digital printing has been an insanely popular option. Printers are very common, the ink and dye quality is excellent, and you don’t have to wait for a photo lab to do the work, letting the printer churn everything out while you go grab a cup of coffee or do some more work.

But colour correction has always been the job of the photographer, and most people are caught unaware that if they’re serious about printing their images, they need to colour correct and profile their monitors, requiring the use of colourometres and spyders, devices used to analyse colour, light, contrast, and more, to understand just what’s going on.

All of this, as you can well expect, adds a level of expertise and cost that most people just don’t want to get into, and it can even confuse quite a few of the professionals out there.

But Canon is trying something different with a new range of PIXMA printers.

Launched initially in two models in PRO range of A3+ printers, the duo features an option that will analyse the colour and image on your monitor screen and match it accordingly, printing out an image closer to what you’re working with on-screen, rather than forcing you to work out what the printer is doing in test prints.

Called “Pro Mode,” it aims to help speed up a workflow by making it easy for anyone to make the printer match what they’re doing, and not the other way around.

The PRO printers will go on sale at the end of October and arrive in the form of the PRO-10 and PRO-100, both featuring this special colour analysing mode, built-in WiFi and Ethernet, borderless A3+ printing, DVD and CD printing, and support for printing directly from Android and Apple mobile devices.

The main differences between the two models are ink quality, with the PRO-100 using eight dye-based ink tanks with 4800 dpi and 3 pico litre printing, while the PRO-10 looks to be even better, using ten pigment-based ink tanks with 4800dpi and 4 pico litre.

These two models aren’t the only two Canon is unveiling, with two multifunctions and one regular consumer-friendly printer rolling out of this announcement, with the PIXMA MG6360 and MG5460, and the iP7260.

All of the printers feature WiFi, Apple AirPrint support, Android printing, at least five separate inks using Canon’s ChromaLife 100 year ink, DVD and CD printing, and 1 pico litre printing at 9600x2400dpi.

The multifunction models – prefaced with MG in Canon’s naming scheme – all feature scanning, photocopying, and at least a 3 inch LCD as well as the ability to snap frames from a Full HD movie shot on your camera and print them out.

Unlike the PRO models, Canon won’t be sending these to retail shelves until late November-early December, so look out for them then.

Canon's multifunction-less dedicated iP7260 printer