Mono/Text Printing

The best results in black and white

Despite its low cost, the Canon MG2950 produces very good text output, with finely detailed characters. Unfortunately, its black ink takes a few seconds to dry, and you can easily smudge documents as they feed out of the printer if you’re not careful. Canon’s more expensive MG6650 corrects that weakness, with pigment-based black ink that dries more quickly while still providing text quality that could give a laser printer a run for its money.

The HP Envy 5640 and Officejet 5740 also use a pigmented black ink, but the text from the Envy 5640 wasn’t quite as smooth as we like. The same was also true of the Epson XP-620 and XP-760. The Officejet 5740 was the only other printer that could match the text quality of the MG6650, and both printers provide a good option for producing textbased documents. However, the Canon MG6650 still has an edge here, with a text speed of 12 pages per minute that puts it comfortably ahead of the Officejet’s 9.5ppm.