In summary
Like Canon’s Pro-100 models, the iP8760 is designed solely for printing. But unlike the ‘Pro’ models, it’s fairly basic in build and capabilities and is designed to print on readily-available sheet papers up to A3+ size. Roll paper printing is not supported.
Like other dye-based printers, it delivers optimal results on glossy, semi-gloss and lustre papers, although it’s no slouch when printing on matt surfaces. Inks dry quickly enough for double-sided printing, partly because they are absorbed into the surface of the paper. This also makes them more scuff-resistant than prints made with pigment inks.
Most photographers will consider this printer on the basis of its affordability, initially for the initial investment in the printer and subsequently for the relatively low ink prices.
Full review
Following our review of the Epson Expression XP-15000, we thought we should look at a similar printer from the Canon stable, the PIXMA iP8760. Like the Epson machine, the iP8760 is designed for photographers who want to make occasional poster-sized prints of their best photos. It has similar usage as a general-purpose photo and document printer.
Angled view of the PIXMA iP8760. (Source: Canon.)
The iP8760 (known as the PIXMA iP8750 or iP8720 in some parts of the world) uses the same ChromaLife100+ dye inks as Canon’s PIXMA Pro-100/Pro-100S printers. But while the Pro-100 models use eight inks, the iP8760 has a six cartridge ink set and is supplied with one double-sized Pigment Black cartridge for document printing plus standard-sized dye ink cartridges in cyan, yellow, magenta, grey and black. For photo printing, only the five dye inks are used.
Interestingly, the iP8760 has higher resolution than the Pro-100 models, offering up to 9600 x 2400 dpi with a minimum droplet size of one picolitre, compared with 4800 x 2400 dpi plus three-picolitre droplets for the Pro-100s. Similarly, users can print from a computer via a USB cable or wirelessly through Wi-Fi syncing with support for Apple AirPrint and Google Cloud Print as well as Wireless PictBridge cameras. Ethernet support is not provided.
Integrated Wi-Fi plus the PIXMA Printing Solutions App enable direct printing of images from a smartphone. (Source: Canon.)
Who’s it For?
Like the Pro-100 models, the iP8760 is designed solely for printing. But unlike the ‘Pro’ models, it’s fairly basic in build and capabilities and is designed to print on readily-available sheet papers up to A3+ size. Roll paper printing is not supported.
On sale through Canon’s online store at AU$329, it represents a cheaper alternative to the PIXMA PRO-100S, which we reviewed in July 2015. The iP8760 can print on papers ranging from snapshot (150 x 100 mm) size through to A3+ 483 x 329 mm) sheets and user-defined sizes up to 329 mm wide and 676 mm in length.
Like other dye-based printers, it delivers optimal results on glossy, semi-gloss and lustre papers, although it’s no slouch when printing on matt surfaces. Inks dry quickly enough for double-sided printing, partly because they are absorbed into the surface of the paper. This also makes them more scuff-resistant than prints made with pigment inks.
Most photographers will consider this printer on the basis of its affordability, initially for the initial investment in the printer and subsequently for the relatively low prices of the inks. See below for our detailed cost analysis.
What’s in the Box?
The printer comes in a solid cardboard carton, complete with Styrofoam packaging, a set of standard-capacity ink cartridges, a sample pack containing three sheets of A4 Photo Paper Plus Glossy II paper, a power cable, a set-up CD with the Windows driver and installation information plus a printed sheet showing how to set up the printer using a sequence of diagrams. A disk printing tray is included in the packaging but no USB cable is provided.
Build, Ergonomics and Set-up
Like most printers of its type, the iP8760 is a rectangular box made from black plastic with a slightly dimpled finish that looks quite smart. Measuring 590 mm in width, 331 mm deep and 159 mm high, it weighs 8.5 kilograms. This gives it a slightly larger footprint than the Epson XP-15000 but the same weight.
The basic design is simpler than the Epson machine. There’s no paper cassette and the front panel folds down to reveal a simple paper support with three extension panels. Papers can only be loaded in the rear sheet feed chute, which has adjustable guides that pull out from the centre to facilitate loading. Everything is snugly assembled to minimise the risk of paper mis-feeds.
There are no controls on the top panel; just three buttons for Power, Stop/Restart and Wi-Fi syncing on the front panel to the right of the output tray. Most functions are controlled through the printer driver or via the Canon app when printing from a mobile device.
The CD/DVD tray slots into the front of the printer at the top of the output chute. It can be stored in a dedicated rack on the rear panel of the printer.
The top panel has two lift-up sections. The front one is raised to load and replace ink cartridges or remove jammed paper, while the rear one covers the main paper feed-in tray. The rear tray cover has two pull-out extensions for supporting papers up to A3+ (329 x 485 mm) sheets. Paper is loaded with the printable side facing forwards.
Setting up the printer is relatively easy, although the supplied instructions are very basic and the online manual can be tricky to navigate. Epson provides much easier to follow assistance.
Nonetheless, once we had plugged the printer into the mains, loaded the ink cartridges and waited the required three minutes or so for the printer to initialise, we were able to connect it to our computer via a USB cable (which is the connection method we think most readers will favour). The printer was instantly recognised by our Windows computer, allowing us to print from any application.
The printer forces you to carry out a Print Head Alignment before printing any photos. The process took several minutes and used one sheet of plain paper as well as the cyan and grey inks. No information was provided on how to ‘read’ the printout but we continued nonetheless.
The driver uses the standard Canon interface, with four pages, shown below.
Like the Epson XP-15000, the iP8760 provides limited ICC profile support, covering only the surfaces and thicknesses of Canon paper the printer can handle: Photo Paper Plus Glossy II, Photo Paper Plus Pro Platinum, Photo Paper Plus Pro Lustre, Photo Paper Plus Semi-gloss along with generic profiles for glossy photo paper and matte photo paper. Selecting Fine Art Papers doesn’t get you beyond a reference to Other Fine Art Paper. The printer’s specs give a limit of 300 gsm for paper thickness, which suggests some fine art papers could be used but heavier media would be unsuitable.
Automatic duplexing (double-sided printing) doesn’t appear to be supported but manual duplexing is easy provided you remember which way to insert the paper in the rear tray. There are also settings for envelopes, Hagaki (10.0 x 14.8 cm) and Other Papers. Manual colour, brightness, intensity and contrast are available, as shown in the screen grab below.
Moving a slider to the right will increase the strength of the selected hue, while moving it to the left weakens it. In each case, the relative amount of ink for the hue is adjusted.
The Contrast slider changes the balance between light and dark tones in a similar fashion. However, the Intensity slider adjusts all inks by equal amounts.
Brightness adjustments are made via a dropdown menu with three settings: light, normal (the default) and dark. They only affect the hues and tones between pure black and white, which are not changed.
The iP8760 can also be used for monochrome printing since its driver has Grayscale settings in both the Quick Setup and Main pages. However, if you’ve selected Photo Printing the driver provides no additional adjustments beyond the manual colour adjustments shown in the screen grab below.
According to the downloaded instruction manual, when Grayscale Printing is selected, the cyan, magenta and yellow sections of the ink monitor are greyed out indicating these inks are unavailable. In theory, this should force the printer to use only the black and grey inks. However, we found the resulting prints always had slight colour casts, even when this setting was used, indicating some colour inks were involved.
To force the printer to use the black inks only, you have to select the plain paper setting in the driver. We used the Photo setting and printed the image on Photo Paper Plus Glossy II paper with High quality output. The resulting monochrome print had no colour casts.
We know the black inks were used because gloss differential was evident, a sign that pigment inks were used on glossy paper. To avoid the gloss differential, we printed the same image on matte paper using the same settings. Unfortunately, the prints were slightly light and rather flat.
We re-printed the image with the Brightness set to dark and obtained a result that was tonally similar to the original print on gloss paper. Using these settings, the results we obtained were similar in quality to those from the Epson XP-15000 with the plain paper/monochrome settings and reasonably attractive.
When printing in grayscale mode, you can adjust the tone slider to ‘tone’ the resulting prints. This option is only available when one of the photo papers is selected so you’ll need to take account of the residual colour toning when fine-tuning the settings. Moving the slider to the right increases the ‘warmth’ of a tone while moving it to the left makes it cooler.
Printing
The iP8760 can be used for general office printing and Canon provides a downloadable brochure with full specifications that include details of expected yields for plain paper printing, based on ISO/IEC 24711 standards. Printing speeds on plain paper are in line with most general-purpose printers, averaging 14.5 pages/minute in B&W and 10.4 pages/minute in colour.
Printing speeds and ink yields for printing 4 x 6 inch photos are also provided, with a claim of approximately 36 seconds per print. We didn’t have any paper of this size to test this claim but, going by the printing speeds we measured for A4 prints, we assume it to be with the Standard quality setting.
Using Canon’s photo papers, we measured the following average times for photo quality printing with the two quality settings on different paper sizes:
A4 at Standard quality – 1 minute 21 seconds
A4 print at High quality – 1 minute 55 seconds
A3 print at Standard quality – 2 minutes 13 seconds
A3 print at High quality – 3 minutes 20 seconds
A3+ print at standard quality – 2 minutes 29 seconds
A3+ print at high quality – 3 minutes 59 seconds
These times are typical of normal photo printing times with consumer-level printers.
To evaluate ink usage we weighed each cartridge before it was installed and again after the printer had indicated it needed replacing. The standard dye ink cartridges supplied with the printer contained six millilitres of ink, while the black pigment ink cartridge had double that quantity although, since only seven millilitres of ink were consumed during our tests, we can’t verify the original capacity.
The first standard cartridge to be replaced was cyan (CLI-651C) which ran out after we had printed a total area of 2.7 square metres. At this point the yellow cartridge was indicating a low ink level and the magenta cartridge was down to about a third of capacity.
The yellow cartridge needed replacing after approximately a quarter of a square metre of paper was covered and the magenta cartridge ran dry about half a square metre later. Each of these cartridges was replaced with an 11 ml XL cartridge.
Replacing cartridges is easy; you simply lift the front flap, which causes the print head to move to the centre, revealing the ink cartridges that ride upon it. You can see which cartridge needs replacing by the corresponding blinking light. Simply clip out the depleted cartridge and replace it with the new one.
We carried on printing until the message shown below appeared, indicating the cyan XL cartridge needed to be replaced. Both the black and grey dye ink cartridges (which were still standard size) were showing low ink warnings.
At this point the printer would not continue printing unless the RESUME button on the front panel was pressed. Pressing it enabled us to make seven more A4 prints before the cyan ink finally ran out.
Printing Costs
To determine ink consumption when printing photographs with the iP8760 we measured each of the cartridges by weighing a full cartridge before inserting it in the printer and again after the printer had declared it empty. The difference between the supplied dye ink cartridges was 6 grams, which suggests they contain approximately 6 ml of ink. We were able to verify that Canon’s XL (high capacity) dye ink cartridges each contain 11 ml of ink. We assume the pigment black cartridge has double this amount but were unable to verify it.
In the course of our tests we printed on 6.63 square metres of paper and used 52 millilitres of ink (calculated by weighing full and ’empty’ or partly depleted cartridges). The listed price for each cartridge in Canon’s online store is AU$23.95 for the standard cartridges and AU$27.95 for the XL cartridges.
We calculated an average usage of 7.85 millilitres of ink (from all colours) per square metre of paper. That equates to $3.99 per millilitre for the standard cartridges or $2.54 for the XL cartridges, the latter representing a considerable cost saving.
If you shop around you can find the genuine Canon XL cartridges for between $20 and $23 each. There are also five-packs of XL cartridges (without the grey ink) selling for between $120 and $125 and six-packs (with the grey ink) for about $142.
Paper Handling
We had no issues with paper handling, regardless of the type and/or surface of the paper and the size of the sheets we printed on.
Print Quality
Output quality was much as we expected from a six ink desktop photo printer with only three coloured inks. The results we obtained were virtually identical to the prints we made with the Epson XP-15000, despite its additional red ink cartridge.
Both printers delivered nice-looking colour prints on glossy, semi-gloss and matte papers and both have the same issues when used for B&W printing. Both printers will use ink when they are switched on after being left for a while without power so it’s best to print in batches if you want to conserve ink.
Conclusion
The PIXMA iP8760 has been around since the second quarter of 2014 so discounting is well established. Canon’s listed price of AU$329 represents the most you should expect to pay for this printer.
Shopping around should reduce the price to between $300 and $350. But if you plan to buy online, be wary of the shipping costs which can amount to more than $45, but are typically less than $20.
Structurally, the iP8760 is a simpler model than Epson’s XP-15000 and, consequently, cheaper to make and buy and more robust to run. While no noise level specifications are provided, we found it relatively quiet to run; if anything slightly quieter than the Epson machine. Its ink is also less expensive. This makes it a better choice for photographers who occasionally make big prints of their best colour pictures and need a printer that can also be used for document printing.
The iP8760 will also be a lot more economical for printing photobooks than the XP-15000. Going on our calculations, a 100-page A4 book printed with the iP8760 will require about $50 worth of ink, compared with about twice that cost for the Epson printer.
SPECS
Printer type: Thermal inkjet
Printing method:On-demand inkjet withFINE print head technology
Minimum droplet size: 1pl/2pl/5pl (C/M), 5pl (Dye BK/Y), 12pl (PgBK)
Resolution: 9600 x 2400 dpi
Paper sizes: A3+, A3, A4, A5, B4, B5, Letter, Legal, Ledger, 4″x6″, 5″x7″, 8″x10″, 10″x12″, Envelopes (DL, COM10), Custom size (width 89 mm – 329 mm, length 127 mm – 676 mm)
Max. paper thickness: Approx 300g/m ²
Ink system: Chromalife 100+ dye inks
Ink cartridges: PGI-650BK, CLI-651BK, CLI-651C, CLI-651M, CLI-651Y, CLI-651GY (optional XL ink tanks available)
Interfaces: Hi-Speed USB (2.0), Wi-Fi (802.11b/g/n),
Power consumption: Standby (Lamp off, connect to PC via WiFi): Approx 1.9 W
OFF (Connect to PC via WiFi) 0.3 W, Printing: Approx 23.0W; Energy Star / EPEAT Approved
Acoustic noise: Not specified
Dimensions (wxhxd): 590 x 331 x 159 mm
Weight: 8.5 kg
Distributor: Canon Australia; 1800 021 167; www.canon.com.au
Rating
RRP: AU$329; US$300
- Build: 8.5
- Features: 8.5
- Print quality colour: 8.8
- Print quality B&W: 8.5
- Paper handling: 9.0
- Consumables costs: 8.6
