Can Canon PIXMA TS6320 be a professional photo printer?

Today we're going to take a look at this entry-level printer and see its ability to print photos, so we can decide if it's possible to use those printers to print professional images. The TS6320 uses five cartridges. It's a typical KCMY setting. Those for the pictures, and then it has a PG black, which is pigment black that is used for text. It has two paper sources. One is underneath the printer, and then there's a straight feed tray from the back, which is nice to have when you print things like labels or glossy papers.

We will compare this printer to an entry-level professional photo printer, Epson Surecolor P600. I know it's not a fair comparison because P600 is about ten times more expensive than this little Canon printer. However, wouldn't it be interesting if this little Canon printer can beat this professional Epson printer? That would be super, super nice. Those professional printers are pretty intimidating; even for the black, you get four blacks. You get matte black, you get photo black, you bring light back, and the light, light black. Those will be pretty super nice, smooth grayscale. For the color, I have cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta.

Out of the box, the Canon did pretty well. We just did a basic installation and clicked print and print this photo. If you give this photo to your grandma, she's not going to complain about the color at all. Canon only offers one ICC for everything for those budget printers, so let's put that ICC on and see if going to improve this picture a little bit. The ICC profile name is called Canon IJ 2005. It should be installed automatically from your installation disc to your PC or Mac. However, Canon doesn't tell you you can use it because they probably don't want you to print photos with their printer. Anyway, so the right side is with ICC. You can see her cheek is redder. She looks more like a natural person than a vampire.

If you don't know how to add ICC to your printer if I have an ICC profile that somebody emails, you can right-click to install. For this, it's already installed, so you can pick any picture and go print. [background noise] Don't worry about this. Go to options, click, and do color management. Here are all the devices on your computer. We're just going to find-- This is a PS600 printer. You can see, after Canon is installed, Canon doesn't point to the ICC profile, so you're printing without ICC. I'll add a file, and then I'm going to find the Canon that I used. There's Canon IJ color printer profile 2005. Okay.

You can also do it in Photoshop. When you do file, print, you can see the color management section. It asks you who's going to handle the ICC profile. You can see right now. It's selected saying printer will manage the color, so the printer will pick ICC because we already attached ICC to the printer a second ago. The printer is going to pick IJ 2005. As paranoid as I am, I often go to-- I'm going to manage myself and choose whatever ICC I want. In this case, I pick this ICC.

With or without ICC, this Canon seems to have some problem with colors. Can you see many squares they lump together, form a big patch, rather than gradually merge into other colors? Can you see the one in the blue? This one is with ICC, and this without ICC is about the same thing. With ICC, the red is a little bit better. It's more gradually faded into yellow. That's probably why we add color to her cheeks. When some color cannot be expressed, it's printed on as the other colors to get a group of colors, just aggregated together.

Printing color is the easy part. Let's check our grayscales. You can see it has a lovely separation of grayscales, and from 255 down to zero, each one is separated. That's okay there. The problem is the continuous grayscale. You can see there's a purplish bend in the middle. You have an issue with color mixing right there. Also, I feel that the transition is not as smooth as possible. It's tough to describe. If I look at it, I get the white. I get the black. Then I get something in the middle. I have three things here, not a gradual change.

It's tough to say, but let's put the Epson on top so that you can see it. On top is Epson, so you can see you get the black. You get the white on both sides. In the middle is a smooth transition. Don't worry about the Canon's black look a little bit deeper because that's a trick on your eyes. I think the Canon adds a little bit cyan or blue in the black, making it look deeper. However, if you do a color check, I did a color check, and the Epson's black is perfect. If you turn the paper sideways, you will see more colors on the Canon. They collapsed together. The Epson looks much, much nicer.

Since we're here, let's put the Canon on the left, Epson on the right. This is what I'm talking about. See how gradual it is, and see those big blotch of color? That means probably something wrong with the blue. Also, we talked about how nice the red is, but if you compare to Epson, which is not evenly distributed gradually out versus the Canon. So the Canon's red is still not as good as Epson's red.

Okay, so much for self-proofing. Let's scan the accurate ICC profile from each of the printers. Let's plot data from both printers. I'm using a CIELAB plot. I assume everybody familiar with it, and let me go over really quick. We're going to put all the colors into our three-dimensional space. The vertical axis is the L-axis. It's from a very, very light, diffuse white to the bottom, which is dark. So if the color is on the top, it's lighter than the color on the bottom.

Imagine your zero is here. For the A-axis, as the color towards left, it's greener. If a color goes to your right, it's more magenta from green to magenta for the A-axis. For the B-axis, if it's towards the left, it's blue. If it's a color more towards your right, it's yellow. This three-dimensional structure captures the color and captures the lightness. These are all the colors that the Epson P600 printer can produce that we've put in this nice three-dimensional space. We call it a gamut plot. If a printer creates a smaller space, that printer is not worth as much as that printer can produce a more significant or more profound space. Let's load the Canon. This Canon's, you already can tell it's slightly rounder than the Epson. Epson's got a lot longer than this.

If you forget, this is what an Epson looks like. Let's just put the two together so we don't have to remember them. Okay, now we've put the two of them together. Let's hide the Canon first, and we make the Epson be a wireframe. This is Epson, and then we put Canon on. All those wires that you see are the color that Epson can generate, but Canon cannot. You can see there's ample, huge space here in the blue and the cyan section that Canon cannot develop.

Not only can the color generate in terms of deepness, if you look at the vertical L-axis, but there's also someplace that Canon cannot go. There's a big chunk of color missing from this Canon printer series, which I will not recommend this printer for color printing. What can you do if your paint is this bad? Guess what? Canon is making a blue cartridge. It's a blue CLI-281 cartridge that you can use in this series. Those printers have five colors, KCMY and PK. They don't have a slot for this one. Only a few models have a blue space for blue cartridges to fix this problem. That'll be interesting to see if you plug that blue cartridge in. What would ICC for look like? Will it look like a bird? Will it look like a plane? Interesting. Maybe if I have money, I probably get another printer that has this blue cartridge. That'd be interesting to see how much Canon corrected and if that can be comparable to the Epson printer.