Canon G550 printer review A4 6 ink MegaTank printer. Printing test for G620/G650

hi my name is keith cooper norflight images and uh this is a review of the canon g550 printer now the g500 series is known by lots of different model numbers around the world so it's a g650 in the uk where there's a scanner on top uh there's a g546 there's loads of different versions of it they're all the same printer inside they're just slightly different models for different markets so um i'm going to have a look through the details of using it now there's a written review on the norflight images website which i go into a little bit more technical detail my written reviews are generally quite long and intended to complement the videos the videos are a relatively new thing for me normally i just do the long written ones but anyway here's a look at the canon g550 what is it well it's an a4 printer so it's quite small for printers that i look at i tend to look at much larger printers but i wanted to have a look at this one um as much as anything uh to see what i could do with it to see whether i could get better results out of it then you might initially first think given its specifications and that so in terms of setting the printer up it's really quite easy and i've done a video looking at the setup and there's an article as well check out the links at the bottom of the video here that's got all the links to further information as you see there are six inks in this these are dye inks and you fill up via bottles that you just put on top and you fill up and there are tanks underneath so we have a black a grey red cyan magenta yellow now the normal colors frinks that you'd get would be black for a four color printer black cyan magenta yellow that's supplemented by a grey which is not particularly meant for black and white use it's for improving the range of tonalities you can get with the strong colored inks the red ink expands the printer gamma a little bit just gives you a little bit more intensity but also red and gray mixed it just adds to the mix of colors you can get now if you're confused about ink types and things like that i've done quite a few other videos not looking at different inks what they mean and what they actually mean to you printing which is not always the same thing because a lot of what you uh maybe read and see people post about different inks and that is heavily influenced by marketing materials and i'm trying to cut through that a little bit and say well this is what you can actually do the inks themselves they're dye based inks and they are canon's older chromalife um inks rather than chromalife plus although chroma knife 100 as both chromalife 100 plus now the plus inks are newer inked and they are they last longer and in particular the black is better so if you were looking at a dye based printer this is one of the reasons why in terms of print quality the canon pro 200 which is also a 13 inch or a3 plus printer is a better choice perhaps if you're looking at the photo side but i know a lot of people look at a printer like this because of the size of these ink tanks here you fill these up i've printed no ender prince testing and the levels have barely gone down this is a printer for experimenting with these tank printers like this if you're concerned about ink prices if print quality matters more to you then i'm sorry you're just gonna have to pay a bit more for ink in my mind it's worth it but that's another matter altogether now the inks just go through into a head here the print head comes out across the usual waiting it's an inkjet printer and say the version with a scanner on it has two lids as it were one lid where you access in here and one lid where you lift to get to the scanner no difference to the actual print side of things so yeah now in setting it up i've used wireless for this it works absolutely fine connected through to our house wireless network um i've got some details in the setup information i've published elsewhere the wireless link works perfectly well it even works well with uh my wife's ipad my iphone her iphone various other bits and pages you can connect anything to this now canon provides software to drive it and they provide software with it this really is consumer level software um if you want to print good quality pictures and i am looking at this printer not as an office printer it's no duplex on it or anything like that which you don't need for photo work anyway it's rather pointless i'm looking at this just for printing photos now i have also printed greetings cards and various other things as well so it's quite a versatile printer um simple loading at the back here you can stack several sheets um i've stacked over a dozen sheets of art paper in this and had no problem feeding it so it works very well there but anyway i've got it set up no wireless connection i could have usb but no wireless connection and i've been using it with apple max now we don't have any windows pcs here normally that makes doesn't make a difference when i'm testing printers with this printer it did but i'll come back to that in a bit because the drivers you install the normal windows driver is just normal print driver for the apple mac and there's older versions and newer versions it makes use of functions that apple call air print so it uses the air print driver now normally if you accidentally set the air print driver on a mac it's a great way of suddenly losing all kinds of printer functionality and whenever i've put other printers about setting them up how to use them how to set up networking and things like that i've always said if you see the word airprint be very careful because the air print driver has severely restricted functionality so um but it's easy to use so it works well with the ipad and works well with the iphone and the canon software canon app will work very well with that but you do have to remember that whether you're using this on a mac or a pc it does make a difference now i've set it up and i've printed now i'll come back to color management which is the key area where this affects things in in in a bit but for the actual use of the printer it's just a normal printer you load up paper you go to whatever software you're using and you print it works very well the paper feeding is reliable as i had no paper feeds no problems even with it quite thick even with quite thick media i've had no real issues with it now i've printed um on pre-folded greeting cards for example now these are quite stiff and they've got a pre-crease on them um these are test images for testing print performance by the way i'll cover that in a look at greeting card printing with this now the paper in those car thin card goes in works absolutely perfectly one thing i would say that to get the best results from any inkjet printer like this for printing on card you absolutely need to use card that is meant for use with inkjet printers if you get ordinary cheap cardstock you are very likely to get poor results on it i'm regularly asked by people i want to print on such and such cardstock you find out it's cheap card maybe reasonable quality looking color but it's not inkjet card and that makes all the difference because it's about the surface layer on the card that needs to be applied to take the inks to stop them bleeding to give the density of color and things so if you're thinking of printing greeting cards and this does print them very well just make sure you use proper cardboard for it because otherwise you'll get rubbish results now in terms of media types in general there are lots and you set them by the screen here when you load up a paper in fact when you load a sheet of paper it will ask you here to set the media type now you don't have to do that i i do anyway just as a sort of belt and braces just to help me not to get things wrong now i'm chopping and changing and doing lots of different papers and things so it's really quite easy for me to put the wrong bit of paper in if i'm not careful so always on a printer i always make sure i set the paper type here if it's available as an option so for this particular paper here this black and white print this is canon fine art rough and this is the only fine art setting on this so any other fine art papers you might choose to use you will use the fine art rough setting for it now quite stiff paper nicely textured sort of a watercolor style paper you load it in the back here and it will ask you for details that you set that just and that's it you're done and it's ready to print no problem whatsoever in terms of um print times it takes perhaps at the highest quality setting about five minutes for a full sheet two minutes at the medium quality setting normally when looking at printers pretty higher in printers the very highest print quality settings are often barely noticeable any difference between them and say medium quality setting so for larger printers i'll often print at the normal quality setting with this one you do notice a slight difference if you look at fine detail um between the high quality and the normal quality and given it's the difference between five minutes for a full-size a4 print here at the highest quality versus a couple of minutes for the medium quality if i'm making pictures that i want to show to people i'm going to print them at the higher quality just gives that little bit of edge to it that is as i say that's unusual for the larger printers i look at where often you get the feeling that the extra extra high settings are available are nothing more than just there to make the specs look good in marketing materials um for this though it does actually make a difference because this is a pretty cheap printer by the standards of the ones i look at i think it's under 200 pounds in the uk um yeah i don't know what prices are elsewhere but you know it's an economic printer especially when you consider how much ink there is in it so it's a printer that is there to experiment with now when you set things on the screen now i would notice yeah one minor gripe is that it's a very small screen it's low contrast it's not backlit but then it's it's a relatively cheap printer uh you get a screen on it it's almost not a touch screen you control it by buttons here for for doing everything yeah fairly straightforward um every so often you know run a plain sheet of paper through it for a nozzle check um it's important after you've set it up to do an alignment check as well just to set the cartridge up because you have to install the cartridge when you're actually setting things up so there we go that's the basics of the printer what about actually printing with it well for color and i've got some examples of some prints i've done here it's potentially very good now if you print test images like this one this is on a glossy paper i can see slight issues in tone areas of strong tone but you have to look quite carefully for it likewise with the testimonies that i've done on the fit media here so it's capable of nice looking results so we've got some more test images here and one thing i would say is when you're experimenting with printer like this do remember to write on the prints or on the back of the prints as to what the settings were because otherwise you will quickly forget what you were doing and what was set to what but in terms of this i'm not got no problems with the actual print quality do i have any problems with it well yes i do have an issue with it if you've seen some of my other reviews you'll know i like to make printer profiles to print with and i normally print these are the target sheets that you use for creating profiles um i normally use some quite advanced kit lots of patches to create color image color profiles that i can use for printing and then i can test them with various test images that i've got as well as real photos i would say that if you're doing test work when you're testing a new paper or a new printer always start with a known test image not one of your own images um the test image you're printing that if you see something wrong there something is wrong in a print setup if you print one of your own images and it comes out wrong well who knows where the fault is it could well come in your own image something that you've never noticed your monitor wasn't set up right or something so always when you're testing use test images i've got a load of these you can download on the northlight images website there's loads of stuff like that but anyway i want to use color profiles now normally i make a color profile and when i print i specify the color profile and that gets applied now profiles i've got stuff explaining what they actually are what you do with them but a profile is like a description of the performance of the paper and ink and printer together that is used to optimize the results now on windows machines that works fine i mentioned earlier the dreaded air print driver unfortunately apple has decided colour management's far too complex for people cannon have gone along with them unfortunately in this instance and there is no canon driver as such where i can specify the color management so i have actually made profiles for this but they are not profiles that uh they're available for people who might want to experiment with them but they'll only work on mac systems because what they are is they're profiling the airprint driver they're not profiling at a low enough level that i would want to use so in terms of profiles on a pc you can get profiles they're unlikely to be available canon won't supply them if you're buying third-party papers and third-party papers work well on this printer with a profile if you're buying that many companies will actually supply or make custom profiles for you for your papers that if you buy paper off them that's worth considering for something like this my mac profiles make a great improvement in print quality it's very noticeable in color images it gives deeper colors better colors smoother colors everything the images are just better if i look at um a print that's printed using just the normal print driver and this would go for windows as well not using profiles if i just use the normal print driver i can see that the colors are not as intense and in particular black and white this section here of the test images one the black and white test image it has a particular tint to it and that tin varies in lighting now i've got a mix of a bit of daylight coming in through windows here and these are halogen led replacement led lights and with using just the printer driver even if i select the black and white print mode there's a little checkbox in the driver for black and white even if i select that the black and white prints just don't look good enough they have a slight magenta bluish tinge to them which i don't really want if i'm printing black and white i want black and white please i don't want bits of color in with it worse still the color varies depending on the lighting now it's not strong and i've seen far worse in the past i think you've got better but this is i'm going to put it down to a weakness of the black ink here now um cover this in the written review in more detail because it depends on the spectral response of the inks and things like that that's not something i'm going to show in in the video but essentially it means you get something called aluminum metamerism which means your prints change color depending on what lighting you're using for them now with really cheap printers the effect can be really obvious you can take your print look at it in one line it has a greenish tinge move to the other end of the room and it suddenly has a purplish tinge that's what you used to have to deal with i would say if you are really keen on black and white printing go for pigment inks the pro 200 which is dye based printer can give good black and white results and i've got some examples of that but if i really want to print black and white i want pigment inks and the next one up from that the pro 300 or the much larger pro thousands really will make a difference for black and white but you know if you want to print a lot of black and white and black and white is important to you i'm afraid a cheap printer is not your option um tough that's the way it is at the moment i'm afraid black and white prince um using my profile and i would never normally recommend using a an icc profile for printing black and white normally the black and white mode of the drawing the driver is better i wouldn't normally suggest that but black and white can come out quite well this is a picture these are steps at wells cathedral and that's on an art paper that's using my profile has a nice look to it i'm not sure how the combination of lighting and video here will precisely affect how this looks on on the video but actually that's not a bad looking print if i look at other areas i've covered with this that's a test print now i've got a black and white test image that's available that i use for testing a lot of black and white um that has a slight that's one with the driver and to my eyes it has a bluish magenta tinge in this light that's i don't like that look so that's that whereas that printed from my driver on the same lustre paper has a much more neutral look to it this picture over here was printed using a driver there's a view in colorado now that's a test image and there's there's articles about using that and a video as well about using black and white test images so that's playing around with black and white and it can give some quite nice looking results now i specialize in black and white and have done for years so i look at this and i can see all kinds of things i'm not quite happy about but that's because i'm being very picky that's because i use much more expensive printer than this to print black and white however if you want to get into just printing it this is good enough um i would say that if you get to the point where you find that the black and white pro uh black and white images and prints that you're getting from this are not good enough then take that as a hint that your skills have advanced far enough that you're gonna have to spend some more money and get a better printer um this is not a bad printer it is what it is it's a basic printer so there's all color ones there as i say cards likewise make sure you print on a proper card these are the pre-folded ones i've got lots of information about these cards feed very well through it so i have no problems with that so that particular test image is to help working out if the card is any good for you now a few other things um making profiles normally i use some quite expensive kit for that but i've also used the cheaper i1 studio or cc studio as it is now for making profiles they work well for this that's a more economical solution i've got a video about making profiles if you're into it and you can set custom pages now you can do borderless such as this this is on a metallic gloss paper one from permajet it's really in the uk really nice gloss metallic finish works well for some images this borderless image here is just printed on luster paper that's a a spider dealing with a wasp that i saw out in the garden just outside here um another picture of a spider um another picture of singer i went to see many years ago but you know lots of interesting pictures lots of people have said yeah they look nice and there is what is your audience for it if you are putting pictures in for competitions at any significant level putting prints in this printer is not up to it if you are printing for camera club and events and things i'm going to say this printer with profiles is probably well up to it and is good enough now you can also use custom paper sizes so here is a print made of a custom paper size cut from a roll so there you go view of uh scene in the lake district in the uk printed this is a finnish matte paper but it will take thicker papers as well and it prints it takes a while to print something that size but you can print panoramics as well you can certainly get hold off what's called double a4 i've said here in the uk which is effectively a sheet that size so it's double a4 it's actually half an a2 sheet so you can cut a two sheets in half to get it and that gives you a panoramic size that works very well on it as well so um in terms of making prints no problems what do i think of its quality well i've mentioned that you know for this printer i pick the higher quality color management well on a on a pc no problem at all use profiles if you can get them on a mac you need to use profiles that are made to get around or try and get around some of the air print driver so it's somewhat problematic because unless you get profiles made for you buying paper for example they are not going to be profiles that work so if you take a windows profile for this normally mac and pc profiles are interchangeable icc profiles they may be called icm pro dot icm rather than icc but they're the same thing the couple yeah the color profiles are interchangeable but not on this printer unfortunately so if you're going to use it on a mac be wary of the color management issues you may face print quality go for the longer size of the longer print times i think it makes a difference if i've not got strong glasses on the difference is not very visible to me and i'm going to say that to many people if you show them two prints they're just going yeah they're the same picture and they probably wouldn't notice it once again depends on your audience what you're using the prints for who's this for well it's meant as a consumer printer for printing photos and it is good for that and i'm sure many people will be happy just connecting their phone or ipad up to it popping some luster paper or gloss paper into there and just going print and they will get prints that look okay they won't get prints that look great they might get pictures that look great i.e the content and the subject and what reaction people give to the picture might look great but from a technical point of view from a print point of view they're not going to be great prints but it's not sold as that if you want to make fine art prints black and white prints i'm afraid you need well one a bigger printer and ideally you need pigment inks for it but that comes at a price so you don't get the big ink tanks like this so that's who i think it's for once again people are going to say this printer is rubbish why did you bother testing it no it's not rubbish and that's the whole point the printer is capable of producing nice looking prints sure if i put them up against a printer that i've got that cost me 2 000 pounds or something like that i'm going to go yeah i can see the difference between them but that's not the point i'm looking at what you can get out of this printer and in fact certainly for a mac user i can get good prints out of it despite canon's attempts at kneecapping the printer driver so please canon except that you've made a good printer mechanism here and bring out a proper printer driver for it um you could get some perhaps that doesn't fit the marketing positioning of it but then that's not my matter i don't sell printers i've got no interest whether you buy a printer or not so hopefully that sort of gives you an idea of what this printer is like what you can do with it please feel free to ask questions in the comments so there'll be a lengthy written review as well and my mac profiles they'll be listed the ones i've made in the written review have a look there and if there are any that are listed there that you want to experiment with let me know i can probably email them to you don't just say all of them because i know you won't have some of the papers i've tested here um yeah if you'd like to test them they're available free for non-commercial use um if you want anything for commercial use contact me directly and i'll let you know but why you would be using this printer for commercial use i'm not entirely sure but anyway hope that's been of interest and thank you very much

Channel: Keith Cooper

Views: 2,672

Keywords:

Id: 0-HctmPDScw

Length: 28min 9sec (1689 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 06 2021