CANON PIXMA TS8350/8320

£180/$200 A six-ink printer but it’s not the usual colour palette that you might expect to discover under the hood

Going literally one up on the PIXMA TS6350/6320 five-ink printer also on test, this up-market model features an additional dye-based ink in ‘photo blue’ flavour. The idea is to extend the colour space as well as enabling smoother graduations in the likes of blue skies within photo prints. The printer itself is available in black, white or racy red, going by the UK model numbers of TS8350, TS8351 and TS8352 respectively.

Other enhancements over its more budget-friendly sibling include a 4.3-inch colour touchscreen instead of a small OLED screen, a higher-resolution 2400x4800dpi scanner, an SD/HC/ XC memory card slot for standalone photo printing, and a tray for printing onto white-faced CD/ Dvd/blu-ray discs.

A similarity is that both printers have a motorized output tray which extends when printing is initiated. The TS8350/8320 adds a slanting front panel, which tilts up to accommodate the output tray. The range of standard, XL and XXL ink cartridges is identical, apart from the additional photo blue cartridge.

Performance

In our tests, print speeds proved identical to those of the TS6350/6320, being impressively fast for both document and photo printing. The addition of the photo blue ink cartridge makes this printer more attractive to serious photographers. Print quality in terms of colour rendition, tonal range and retention of fine detail is excellent. There’s plenty of vibrancy on tap to do full justice to rich landscape colours, while skin tones look very natural. Even so, the enhancement in blue skies and other graduated blue areas often tends to be quite negligible, compared with the 5-ink model.