Poor Print Quality with Canon pixma ip2600

Reading your symptom it sounds like the wrong colour profile is being used. These profiles are mostly associated with the photo paper stocks, so if one of these was incorrectly selected then it could explain the output.

When you select to print from Mail, change the Mail menu in the Print dialog to Color Matching and ensure that 'Canon Color Matching' is selected. Then change the menu to 'Quality & Media' and ensure that Media Type is set to Plain Paper and that Print Quality is set to Standard. Note that with Print Quality set to Fast you will get light-gray text.

With the above settings selected, if you are still getting light output of text and pale colours then there could be something wrong with the Canon driver you are using. Can you confirm that you are using v10.30.3.0 of the driver. This can be determined via Print & Fax. With the printer selected open Options & Supplies and look at the General tab for the driver version.

I just tested a print from Mail to my iP5200R, which is using the v10.30.3.0 driver, and the black text printed correctly. The From, Subject and Date tags did print as gray. Would you say that your gray text is the same level of gray as the Subject tag?

Note that the light gray output could be the result of the black head leaving gaps between the black ink droplets, such as what occurs when Fast Print Quality is selected. Or it could be a result of mixing other colours, like magenta, with the black to achieve the lighter output, which is what occurs with the Mail header tags. If you were to look at the text with a magnifying glass, which of the two causes would be most likely what is occurring for you?

Hello Karen,

Unfortunately there is no tutorial on uninstalling the old driver and installing a new version. The installation of the new driver should overwrite the old and bring the driver versions up to date.

Before describing a manual process for manually removing the Canon drivers I suggest you download the [Canon Printer Drivers 2.3 for Mac OS X v10.6|http://support.apple.com/kb/DL899].

Before running this update I suggest you remove the existing print queue to the Canon and unplug the USB cable. To remove the queue, open Print & Fax, select the printer in the list and press the minus button under the list to remove.

After removing the print queue, run the installer for the v2.3 update and restart your Mac when it is completed. The existing Canon drivers on your Mac should be updated to the latest version.

Now you can reconnect the printer USB cable to the Mac and the print queue should be added automatically using the latest driver.

With this latest driver hopefully the printing issue is resolved. Reply if an issue still exists.

Pahu

Hi Karen. Sorry to read that you are still having problems with the latest drivers.

At this stage I suggest you ensure that the printhead is working correctly. This can be done via an included Canon utility.

Open Print & Fax, select the iP2600 and click Options & Supplies. Now select the Utility tab then Open Printer Utility. This will open the Canon IJ Printer Utility. With the top menu set to USB you should see the iP2600 in the list. Select it and then press the Maintenance tab. This will open with the menu defaulted to Cleaning. If you change this menu to Test Print, you can execute a nozzle check to ensure that all colours are printing correctly. If any of them look faint or missing lines, then you change back to the Cleaning menu and perform a nozzle clean (try Cleaning first then Deep Cleaning if the output doesn't improve). If the output looks good with the nozzle test then you can quit the utility.

With the printhead working correctly the next test is to print a PDF from Preview. If you have not deleted it you can open the 'About Stacks' file in Preview or any other PDF if this file is no longer on your Mac. If you then select to print with the iP2600 as the printer, change the Preview menu to Quality & Media. For the Media Type menu ensure you have Plain Paper selected and for the Print Quality you want Standard. Now change the menu from Quality & Media to Color Options and ensure Color Mode is set to Standard. With these settings selected click the Print button and check the output. Is this quality still poor?

Sorry to read you could not get it working. Would love to know what it was but since the printer was so 'cheap' then it is probably not worth your time to find the solution...