Canon Pixma iP1800 Photo Printer Review

The Canon Pixma iP1800 is a budget inkjet desktop photo printer. With a shiny black and lightweight frame, the iP1800 is capable of printing photos and documents up to 8.5x11 inches in size. Using only two ink cartridges, it is easy to maintain and gets you printing for an inexpensive $49 base price.

The printer is fairly compact at 9.3 x 17 x 6 inches. The top of the iP1800 opens to reveal the paper tray, while the power cord plugs into the back and a USB cable into the left side. This printer uses two cartridges, one for black ink and a  tri-color cartridge for color prints. The value of the print cartridges is fairly good, with a single color cartridge able to print up to 82 color photos.

Like most desktop printers, the printer itself doesn’t have any menus. Everything is controlled via the print drivers and software on your computer. The drivers install a multi-tab control panel with a wide variety of options. The iP1800 ships with two pieces of software. Easy-PhotoPrint provides a simplified interface for printing photos easily, and Easy-LayoutPrint allows you to create albums, calendars, and other projects using your photos.

The Pixma iP1800 can print 8.5x11 text documents at a speed of 1.12 pages per minute. This is not very fast compared to its competitors. Its graphics print speed is even worse, at 0.5 pages per minute. Photo print speed is also poor, with the iP1800 coming in marginally slower than the Epson Stylus Photo R2400 and significantly slower than the Canon Pixma Pro9000.

The Pixma iP1800 is meant to be a photo printer, with document printing as a nice extra. As a result, the quality of document printing was only adequate, while photo quality was mixed. Color accuracy was poor, although the range of colors that could be printed was more impressive than we expected. The Pixma was lackluster when printing black tones, leading to poor quality black and white prints.

The $49 Pixma iP1800 photo printer performs better than the HP Photosmart A440, a compact inkjet photo printer that costs twice as much. The iP1800 won’t provide the print quality of its bigger brother, the Canon Pixma Pro9000, but of course you’d expect much better quality from a printer that costs ten times more.

The Canon Pixma iP1800 printer is fairly easy to use, with only two buttons on the device and intuitive drivers and software. However, it did exhibit some annoyances, such as having to manually set the printer to account for different paper thicknesses, which most printers handle automatically. The iP1800 doesn’t deliver the highest quality photo prints, especially if you are looking to print black-and-white photos. But if you’re looking for a cheap photo printer that can handle everyday quality letter-sized photos and documents, then you could do worse than the Pixma iP1800.

For a more in-depth review, visit the Canon PIXMA iP1800 Review at our partner PrinterInfo.com