Canon PIXMA Home TS9060

BIG ON BEAUTY.

PRINTERS ARE LARGELY thought of as ‘appliances’, much like a toaster or kettle — the looks don’t matter so much as the fact that it gets the job done. But the popularity of brands like Morphy Richards and Russell Hobbs have proven there’s a market for good-looking appliances. The Canon PIXMA Home TS9060 falls very much within this camp, with its racing-car red lid (it’s also available in white) and compact footprint.

But good looks will only get you so far. In the TS9060’s case, the favourable first impressions aren’t followed up with promising performance. Frustration sets in as early as the setup procedure, where, after printing and scanning a few test pages, it says that its performing ‘initial adjustments’. An hour later, it’s still on the same screen, and it’s not clear — nor intuitive — that we’re actually supposed to press the ‘Stop’ button to continue with the setup.

The problems continue with some instructions that aren’t grammatically correct, dialogue boxes that don’t fit within the 5-inch touchscreen and require you to swipe down and across to find the relevant button to tap (mainly for enabling cloud services like Facebook, Instagram and Google Drive), and having to ‘register’ paper every time we changed it in the print tray. We were also perturbed to find that the ‘easy wireless connect’ option for setting up a Wi-Fi connection required us to switch to a computer or smartphone.

It’s a shame, as the prints are higher quality and cheaper than average at 12c per page — even if it does take its time with everything. Colour documents in particular are slow, at 1.3 pages per minute.