Believe it or not I’ve only just got around to getting some serious photo printing done on my new Canon PIXMA MG7150.
Using nothing but Lightroom 5.6 you can get some seriously impressive prints from this printer. I’m still to really put the extra grey levels to the test with some difficult black and white prints but so far things look really good. I decided to start with a difficult print of a shot of my daughter. You can see this image below:
As you can see this is the type of image that can really challenge printers due to the nature of the colour processing that has been applied to the image in post processing. After having printed this image via Lightroom I was actually blown away by the accuracy of the print the MG7150 produced. I was using Kodak 280gsm Ultra Premium Photo Paper (High Glass, ultra brilliant) the the stock branded ink cartridges that came supplied with the printer so the inks are also premium.
So far I cannot fault the output. Obviously it isn’t up there with the links of Metro Print but to get the results I have from a £150 all-in-one printer is really impressive to say the least. The accuracy in terms of the dynamic range is what struck me the most, it really is faithful to the image on the screen. No doubt the correct configuration of the ICC profiles helps here a lot. Also the print was made using Lightroom 5 on my MacBook Pro which as I understand it employs Black Point Compensation by default (configurable on PC) which goes a very long way to making sure the shadows aren’t blown out. This is obviously working very well.
In fact I’m so impressed with the printing that if I could source the inks and paper cheaper by buying them in bulk and provided the client wanted A4 or smaller prints I’d be happy supplying the output of this printer to clients and final product. It really is that good.
All in all to be able to use a single machine to scan, photocopy, print documents and then do some pretty impressive “fine art” printing is laudable to say least. Thank you Canon, you have done really very well indeed.
So to carry on with these tests I’m looking for my favourite papers to use for printing fine art prints. Unfortunately one of the only drawbacks I’ve encountered is the printer only supports upto 300/gsm papers and the paper I would really like to use is Hahnemühle Photo Rag but that clocks in at 308gsm and I don’t feel adventurous enough to whack a load of this into my new shiny printer just in case it kills it.
Anyway, I currently have a nice test pack of St Cuthberts Mill Somerset Enhanced papers on their way to me for more lovely playing around.
Printing Problems
The only problem I’ve encountered whilst using this printer has been the paper feeding. The MG7150 is rated good for paper upto 300gms which is actually pretty thick paper. I’ve noticed that as soon as the paper supply is down to around 5 sheets in the lower paper tray this becomes a problem for the printer and it struggles to pick up the sheets. Not a massive problem in real terms but it does get slightly annoying when doing long runs. I’ve done a lot of 4 x 6 printing on upto 255gsm paper, these smaller print sizes makes use of the upper tray and this doesn’t suffer from the same issue at all.
Just something to bear in mind.
This is a nice round general roundup on the printer, thanks! Are there any negatives you’ve come across so far? Would be interested to know.
I’ve updated the post with a couple of “negatives” on the printer. There isn’t much wrong with this unit to be honest.