As you're selecting photos, you can make adjustments to the image quality by either selecting general tweaks or making changes manually. For example, you can select Vivid Photos to boost greens and blues; Photo Optimizer Pro, which optimizes brightness and tone; Noise Reduction, Face Brightener; or Image Optimizer. If you prefer more control, you can manually adjust brightness, contrast, and color hue. If you want an even greater range of image editing control or effects, the ArcSoft PhotoStudio program is a very useful tool.
There are a couple of major omissions on this printer that we'd like to see in future versions. First is the ability to use the PictBridge port to connect USB storage devices, such as external hard drives or flash thumbdrives, and to print pictures directly from them as you would from a memory card (the MP500 doesn't offer this feature, either). The second missing feature is a menu option to save photos from a memory card to the connected PC. With the Pixma MP510, you can navigate to My Computer where you should find the memory card listed as a drive. Saving the photos is a simple matter of dragging and dropping the files onto your PC. However, we've seen many printers, such as the HP Photosmart C5180 and the Epson PictureMate Snap, that offer a Save to PC option, which is a simpler and more elegant solution. Some of them even let you save photos both ways between a PC and a memory card, a PC and a USB storage device, and a memory card and a USB storage device.
Performance
With each new version of a printer, we expect to see improved scores and performance. Unfortunately for the Pixma MP510, we did not see faster print scores. The MP510 printed text at a rate of 6.37 pages per minute, slightly behind the Pixma MP500's 7.08ppm but ahead of both the Epson Stylus CX7800 and the HP Photosmart C5180. It was a pretty fast photo printer, though, producing 4x6 prints at a rate of 1.26ppm. This score is roughly on a par with the MP500's 0.56ppm for an 8x10 print. The MP510 lagged behind both the Epson and HP printers when creating grayscale scans, with a score of 5.28ppm, but it turned around and beat both at color scans, with 5.20ppm.
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
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Color scan | |
Grayscale scan | |
Photo | |
Text |
The text quality was decent, though a bit odd. The text was nicely dark, and while the edges weren't perfectly sharp, they were decent for an inkjet. But overall, it had a sort of "swollen" quality to it, as the letters looked thicker than normal. Still, the text was legible down to very small point sizes. The color graphics were great, with smooth gradients, nice color reproduction, and a very smooth color saturation we found pleasing. The photo elements showed good detail, too. The text on this graphics page suffered from the same problem as text on the text-only print, though, and we noticed some jaggedness in curves. The 4x6 photo prints showed good detail and sharpness, but we would've liked for the colors to be just a bit richer and more vibrant.
The color scan exhibited excellent color reproduction, but had a slightly hazy look to it, as if it had been scanned through some type of filter. The grayscale scans fared a bit worse. Although the scan was sharp and showed good detail, the blacks weren't truly black, more of a very dark gray.
Overall, between the MP500 and the MP510, we found print quality to be a draw, with perhaps a slight edge to the MP500. The MP500 had much nicer text prints but exhibited too much red and blue in the photo elements on the color graphics page. We like the skin tones on the MP500's photo better, but we thought the photo had a cast that was too somber. Overall, we preferred the print quality of the Canon Pixma MP510 to either the Epson Stylus CX7800 or the HP Photosmart C5180.
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
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Color scan | |
Grayscale scan | |
Photo | |
Graphics | |
Text |
Service and support
Canon provides a one-year limited warranty for its consumer printers, as well as a year of free, toll-free phone support Monday through Friday from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturdays from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. PT. You can extend the warranty to three years for $95. You can also get tech support via e-mail, and Canon says it will respond within 24 hours. Canon's site has FAQs, a troubleshooting tool, downloadable drivers and software, and PDFs of product and software manuals.
What You'll Pay
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