Canon Pixma TS5050
All-in-one inkjet printer is sheets ahead
How do you make an all-in-one inkjet printer stand out? Some manufacturers add fancy colours and swoopy curves. But Canon’s new design distinguishes itself by being compact and self-effacing. We like it. The 3in colour LCD isn’t a touchscreen, but the new menu buttons are easy to use, and you can print wirelessly from Apple, Android and Windows 10 Mobile devices as well as PCS, or directly from an SD card. One annoyance is that the 100-sheet paper tray has a flap that you have to close manually, and the printer sometimes wouldn’t recognise we had closed it until we wiggled it a bit.
The TS5050 did well in our speed tests, reaching 12.5 pages per minute (ppm) on a 25-page black text document in both normal or the ink-saving draft mode. Colour pages came out at 3.7ppm, or 4.8ppm in draft mode. At high detail, two 10x8in photos took nearly seven minutes but were worth the wait, although photo professionals would notice colours appear a little ‘warm’ (ie, they have a red tint). The five-ink system uses black pigment for text and black dye for graphics. Shop around for Canon’s XL cartridges and you’ll pay about 2.5p a page for text or 7p for colour graphics. That’s a bit pricier than some rival printers, but not bad.
The scanner was quick for this class of machine right up to 1200dpi, although photocopies, at 20 seconds for black and a tad longer for colour, could have been faster and were slightly dark. Scanning quality was excellent, with sharp focus and wide dynamic range.
So why doesn’t it get five stars? Unlike Canon’s MG5750 (see our review, Issue 470), our current favourite printer, the TS5050 can only print on one side of the paper. If you want to use both, you’ll have to ask your software to print the odd-numbered pages first, then feed the paper back in and print the even pages on the back, a process likely to result in confusion and paper jams. That aside, the TS5050 is recommended.
VERDICT: It’s a pity that it doesn’t support double-sided (duplex) printing, but this is otherwise a very good all-inone printer
★★★★☆
ALTERNATIVE: Canon Pixma MG5750 £70 This bulkier machine lacks an SD slot but can print both sides, and uses the same ink cartridges
Greatscansand speedyoutput, butno double-sided printing