BLIND BUY: BEWARE THE SUPERM ARKET PRINTERS
It’s tempting to pick up a cheap printer from the supermarket – but beware, you may end up paying far more than you bargained for
It’s no secret that printers are generally becoming cheaper, but venture out to your local supermarket and you may find some mind-blowing deals. For less than £30, you can pick up a stylish, wireless all-in-one from a major brand, giving you what looks like premium levels of quality and performance at a knock-down price. Where’s the catch?
To find out, we purchased two from a nearby branch of Tesco: a Canon Pixma MG4250, a 2012 model now selling at an impressively low £50; and an HP Envy 4520, a 2015 model priced at an incredible £30. Both include a flatbed scanner, 802.11n Wi-Fi and colour displays. Had we found ourselves a great deal?
Well, first impressions made us think so. The Canon’s 6.2cm colour screen isn’t gigantic by modern standards, and it has old-fashioned button-based controls, but it’s easy to use and offers some nice features, including support for cloud-printing services, a “quiet print” setting, and compatibility with the Canon Print mobile printing app.
The HP Envy 4520, meanwhile, has the same stylish, compact design as its more expensive stablemates, not to mention the same smooth setup. Its touchscreen interface is well designed and responsive, and we rather like the cheeky way the little support for the output tray swivels into place when you click Print, like a tongue sticking out of its mouth. It also works well with HP’s ePrint service and other cloud printing services, as well as HP’s All-In-One Remote mobile app. Predictably, neither printer is exactly speedy. The Canon took nearly four and a half minutes to print out our A4 test photomontage, while a throughput of 8.8ppm for black-andwhite pages and 2.6ppm for colour is hardly chart-topping. The cheaper HP is slightly faster, printing the photomontage in just over three minutes and reaching 16.3ppm for monochrome and 9.8ppm for colour, but it’s still comparatively slow. The Pixma lays down too much ink on the page, sometimes saturating the paper, while black text doesn’t show much finesse – but get it to print photos onto glossy paper and it can produce surprisingly decent results, albeit with muted colours and some grain. The HP fares slightly better, with more clarity and vibrant colours. Text isn’t great, with some ragged edges, but for a generalpurpose inkjet printing on plain paper, it isn’t bad. The catch lies in the running costs. The Canon is the better of the two here, shipping with standard-sized cartridges and offering the option of XL cartridges later, with a claimed yield of 600 black and 400 colour pages. This puts the cost per page at 10.8p for colour and 3.8p for black-and-white. The HP is cheaper than we expected when it comes to colour, with its XL tri-colour cartridge yielding 330 colour pages for a cost of 7.8p per colour print, but blackand-white prints will set you back a horrifying 5.3p per page. What’s more, our printer came with a set of starter inks that began running out after we finished formal testing (the Canon’s inks were still three-quarters full at the same point).
This leaves the Canon the most expensive printer in this test for colour, with the HP holding the same “accolade” for black-and-white. We wouldn’t expect either printer to have a lifespan covering many thousands of prints, but print just 2,500 pages, one-third colour to two-thirds black-and-white, and the HP would bring the total cost to £183 and the Canon to £203. Our Labs-winning Brother would have cost you just £142. And that’s not taking into consideration the usual cost of having just one colour cartridge (run out of one colour and the whole thing is useless), not to mention ink wasted through cleaning if you only print intermittently.
HP has an “out” here in that it sells the printer with an Instant Ink promotion, encouraging you to ditch buying your own inks and sign up to a subscription service. But with monthly payments starting at £1.99 for 50 pages, that might not suit your needs. Does that supermarket printer still appear a bargain? Think carefully before you buy.
“We like the cheeky way the support for the output tray swivels when you click Print, like a tongue sticking out of its mouth”