Canon Pixma TS9050
Brilliant for photos, and a lovely design, but not the most affordable or versatile home printer option
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £183 (£220 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com
If nothing else, Canon’s premium home printer wins plaudits for its ingenious design. When not in use, it’s a low-profile square unit with a 372 x 324mm desktop footprint measuring only 140mm tall; when it’s ready to print the output tray extends outwards above the 120-sheet input cassette, and if you’re planning to print photos then you’ll need to pull out the 20-sheet tray at the back. Fail to remember and the printer will send a grumpy message before it even considers printing out a page.
It’s easy to use, partly thanks to its large 12.6cm capacitive touchscreen, which is far more responsive than the resistive efforts found on many other models. Canon’s configuration utility makes easy work of finding and setting up the wireless connection, and once installed the main copy, print and scan functions are only a tap away.
Mobile and cloud connectivity are also strengths. The Canon print app provides access to print and scanning functions from your smartphone, the Pixma cloud link service lets you print from the cloud, and there’s NFC connectivity for scanning and printing from Android phones at a touch. What’s more, photographers can print and adjust photos on the printer using the SD card slot at the front; the big screen makes the process more comfortable.
If photo quality is your priority, the Pixma is an excellent option. While you won’t get good results on plain paper, feed it glossy media and you can get fantastic prints with lots of detail, vibrant colours and good dynamic range. Business graphics are also nicely handled, with smooth graduations, subtle tints and fine, sharp edges. Text looks good as well, although the definition isn’t quite as crisp and smooth as with the best office printers.
Where the Pixma falls short is on speed and running costs. Printing such high-quality photos takes well over two minutes, while mono and colour print speeds top out at 12.3ppm and 3.7ppm respectively. HP’s Envy 7640 has it beaten on both counts, not to mention on scanning, where the Canon took nearly two minutes to output a full-page colour 600dpi scan. Colour prints are also expensive at 8.7p per page, even if it’s reasonably affordable at 1.4p per page when printing black-and-white. The Pixma is a beautifully designed printer, but it will cost you in the long run.