Canon Pixma IP 1200
Looks And Features
The Pixma IP 1200 is sleek, with a forward-sloping wedge-shaped body. There’s one readily apparent demerit: there’s no output tray at all! You’ll need to keep the printer at least a foot away from the edge of the table, else all your printouts will be on the floor. The outer body is rather flimsy, as are the movable parts. Canon could have done a much better job here: the Epson units we tested show how this can be done at a budget price.
Performance
Canon’s Pixma series feature some of the fastest printers you’ll see. With timings of two minutes and five seconds for printing our combi-document, and just under four minutes for the A4 photo, the IP 1200 leaves the competition chewing the dust, speed-wise.
In the pure text tests, the IP 1200 gave poor results at the draft setting, with the printed text looking slightly faded, and with slight spiking (imperfections in lines and curves) noticeable-but nowhere near as pronounced as on the Epson models. At high settings, the print quality was good, though upon magnification, a slight spiking around the edges of the text was noticeable.
The combi-document was a little blurry at medium settings-noticeable in the smaller font sizes-but this cleared up at high quality. The level of detail for the fruit printout was acceptable, but some of the brighter colours seemed to merge at times. The embedded photo was sub-par at medium settings, and even at high settings, the quality was just decent.
Our A4 test photo looked good with the Pixma IP 1200: no lines whatsoever, good detail, and the fine details of facial features weren’t missed. The IP 1200 seemed to produce slightly saturated images at default colour and tone settings: the yellows, while vibrant, appeared too bright, and this caused the skin tone to change a little. The highlights and contrast were good.
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