As the midlevel model in Canon's professional inkjet photo printer line, the Canon Pixma PRO-10 ($699) strikes a good balance between price, ink cost, and photo quality. It prints gallery-worthy photos, and—like the other models in the series—it does particularly well with monochrome prints, and other photos with dark backgrounds. Although it lacks some of the features of the Editors' Choice Epson Stylus Photo R3000 , like an LCD and the ability to print from paper rolls, as well as that printer's superb graphics quality and speed, the PRO-10 is easy to recommend for professionals and serious amateurs alike.

Design and Features
The matte-black PRO-10 is a large, wide printer that you'll want to set on a table or bench. At 8.5 by 27.2 by 15.2 inches (HWD) when closed, the PRO-10 is the same size as the Canon Pixma PRO-100 ($362.54 at Amazon) . It's slightly larger than its closest Epson counterpart, the Epson R3000, though it lacks the latter's LCD screen. Instead, data such as ink-tank levels are displayed on the screen of the computer you're printing from. The Pixma Pro-10 offers Wi-Fi and Ethernet, as well as USB connectivity.

Paper is fed through from the auto-feeder or the single-sheet rear feeder. According to Canon, the auto-feeder holds up to 150 sheets of plain paper, 20 sheets of 4-by-6-inch photo paper, 10 sheets of 8-by-10-inch or letter-size photo paper, or a single sheet of A3+ photo paper (up to 13 by 19 inches). In actuality, it has no trouble feeding from a sheaf of about ten 13-by-19-inch photo sheets. Using an included metal sleeve, the PRO-10 can also print on optical discs.

In addition to offering various types of photo paper at sizes up to 13 by 19, Canon sells several fine art papers, including Bright White, Photo Rag, Enhance Velvet, Museum Etching, and Watercolor.

The Pixma PRO-10 uses 10 ink tanks for its dye-based inks: matte black, photo black, gray, light gray; yellow, magenta, photo magenta, cyan; photo cyan, and red. The lower-end PRO-100 uses 8 ink tanks, and the higher-end Canon Pixma PRO-1 sports 12. The PRO-10's ink costs—at least in cost per milliliter (ml) of ink, as there's no good way to measure the cost per printed page for this sort of printer—are considerably higher. Each of its tanks holds 14ml of ink, at a cost of $1.08 per milliliter, compared with $1.00 per milliliter for the PRO-1, which has much higher-capacity (36ml) tanks, and $1.31 per milliliter for the PRO-100's 14ml tanks. The Epson R3000 has ink costs of $1.25 per milliliter. Although the PRO-10 has a lower cost per milliliter than the R3000, it doesn't necessarily translate to a lower cost per printed page. Cross-brand comparisons are suspect because Epson and Canon use different inks, which are applied in slightly different ways.

Speed
Speed is less important than quality with near-dedicated photo printers, but faster is still preferable. I timed the PRO-10 at an average speed of 1 minute 55 seconds in outputting a 4-by-6-inch print and 2 minutes 59 seconds per 8 by 10. This is slower than the Canon PRO-100's average of 1 minute 17 seconds to output a 4-by-6-inch print and 2:01 for an 8 by 10, but faster than the Canon PRO-1's times of 2:14 and 3:53, respectively. It was significantly slower than the Epson R3000, which scored 53 seconds per 4 by 6 and 1:41 per 8 by 10.

Output Quality
Although using the PRO-10 to print text documents is decidedly overkill, this printer has very good text quality, and does well with small fonts. Graphics quality is par for an inkjet. Some illustrations showed mild banding (regular, faint, horizontal striations) in our tests, and the printer had a difficult time with thin, colored lines. On the downside, although we don't time the business printing speed of near-dedicated photo printers, its speed in printing out text and graphics at default settings could best be described as painfully slow.

See How We Test Printers

Of course, the PRO-10 is all about photo printing, and in that it excels. In our standard photo tests, it did very well in capturing detail in both light and dark areas. Our monochrome test photo was free of any tinting. In ad-hoc testing, with both letter-size and larger-format (13 by 19 inches) prints, the PRO-10 consistently produced gallery-worthy prints. As with the other printers in Canon's professional photo inkjet line, it does particularly well in printing monochrome images and photos with very dark backgrounds.

Of the three Canon Pixma PRO printers, the PRO-10 provides the best balance of price, cost per milliliter of ink, speed, size, and image quality of the group. The PRO-10 is a touch larger than the Editors' Choice Epson Stylus Photo R3000, is considerably slower, and doesn't have as good graphics quality. The Epson printer has an LCD and can print from both paper rolls and cut sheets. They both print magnificent photos. The Canon Pixma PRO-10 is a formidable printer, and may be a better choice for a professional or photo enthusiast whose photographic style tends toward the noir.

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