Top of Canon’s new range of six photo printers, the Pixma IP6700D replaces last year’s highly successful IP6600D. Like the other printers reviewed here, it uses six individual ink tanks, filled with a dye-based ink.

A good selection of controls enables you work from the printer, rather than a PC. This goes beyond simply printing photos: a touch of a button will transfer stored pictures to your PC.

No confirmation is required at the PC end, so the process is entirely automatic. However, if you press the button by mistake you’ll have to go to the PC and cancel the transfer from there.

Using the printer’s front panel isn’t quite as speedy as on the Epson or HP printers – it takes a little longer to read the memory card and browse through the images. It’s also a little less intuitive. For example, the display says “Stop > Cancel” to interrupt an operation, but there are no buttons marked either ‘Stop’ or ‘Cancel’.

There is actually a dedicated cancel button that will put a stop to the unwanted print job, but we would have found it quicker had the display not been slightly misleading. HP’s D7360 certainly has the edge in usability here.

When printing from Adobe Photoshop, we found A4 borderless printing to be a little problematic, often leaving us with small unwanted borders. Although this issue may be specific to Photoshop, we didn’t encounter similar problems with the other printers.

The flexible media handling of the IP6700D puts it ahead of the competition. Not only does it support direct DVD/CD printing such as the Epson Stylus Photo R630, it also includes automatic double-sided (duplex) printing as standard – even in photo mode if you use Canon’s new double-sided photo paper.

As with HP’s Photosmart D7360, it has two paper trays, allowing two types of paper to be loaded simultaneously so you can swap between printing photos and documents with the minimum of fuss.

Unlike either of the other printers, the IP6700D uses a printhead that’s separate from the ink cartridges and must be installed separately. This cuts down on the cost of the individual ink cartridges but means you have an extra component that might need to be replaced eventually.

Installing the ink cartridges is easy, although access isn’t quite as simple as either the Epson or the HP printers. You have to open the lid from the top and peer through a relatively narrow gap to see what you’re doing.

The process is made much easier by Canon’s use of illuminated ink cartridges, so you can see immediately which cartridge needs replacing.

We found the relative performance of the IP6700D to be quite variable: in some tests it’s the fastest, while in others it lags behind. Despite being technically the highest resolution printer of the three in this group test, with a maximum resolution of 9,600x2,400dpi and a droplet size of just one picolitre, it consistently outperforms the competition when printing photos at maximum quality.

What it lacks is a fast mid-quality photo mode as provided by Epson and HP. In some cases, setting it up for standard quality actually caused it to print more slowly.

With automatic settings selected, the IP6700D produced slightly sharper images than Epson’s Stylus Photo R360 but at the expense of some punch in the colours. Overall, there’s very little to separate any of the printers on print quality alone.

This article is part of a group test of A4 photo printers
See also
Epson Stylus Photo R360
HP Photosmart D7360
How we tested the photo inkjet printers
Photo printing under Windows Vista
Graphs and table of features can be read via our pdf downloads above