Canon PIXMA G650/G620 £255/$329
This dye-based, six-ink Canon MegaTank printer is aimed squarely at high-volume photo printing
Like other Canon MegaTank inkjet printers, the G650 (G620 in the USA) is a cartridge-free machine that has relatively high-volume ink tanks, topped up by 60ml bottles of ink, working out at about an eighth of the cost of most cartridge-based printers. The printer itself is refreshingly affordable for a MegaTank machine.
The photo-friendly line-up of six dye-based inks includes CMYK plus red and grey inks, aiming for a wide colour space and enhanced mono photo quality.
The individually keyed, squeeze-free bottles ensure simple, mess-free top-ups and make it impossible to pour ink into the wrong tank.
There are no internal paper feed cassettes; just an upright input tray at the rear, which makes it easy to swap between different sizes of plain or photo paper. There’s also no colour touchscreen, but the small mono LCD enables an intuitive pushbutton interface. It makes short work of creating mono or colour photocopies courtesy of the built-in scanner. Connectivity is good, too, with USB and Wi-Fi, the latter enabling PIXMA Cloud Link for smartphones and tablets, Apple AirPrint, Mopria for Android and Wireless Direct.
Performance
A set of ink bottles is sufficient for 3,800 6x4-inch photos, or around 3,700 mono documents or 8,000 colour documents. Despite lacking pigment-based black ink, mono text is rich and crisp. Print speeds are slower than with the other PIXMA printers on test, but a borderless A4 photo print only takes a couple of minutes in standard photo quality mode. Colour rendition is impressively accurate, tonal range is very good and the printer makes a good stab at black and white photo printing. In the long run, it’s great value for a highly capable photo printer.