Canon TS6160

RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE GROUND.

ACTING AS THE little brother to the TS8160 (back over the page), the TS6160 shares a lot of its characteristics, but comes in approximately $50 cheaper. The overall look and feel of the printer is largely the same — they’re the same dimensions with a very similar aesthetic — but it’s easy to see in action how these two differ.

Setting it up takes the same brief amount of time, and the process is easy. The ink tanks are accessible, with the printhead under the scanner, and obligingly shuffles to the middle of the guide rail so you can plug in the five ink tanks. Four are dedicated to colour images, and one separate blank tank handles documents. The scanner uses a printed test sheet to help align the nozzles, and from there, you’re away.

Surprisingly, the TS6160 printed our test document faster than the more expensive model, at 6ppm. Print quality here is on-par with the TS8160, though the Epson still takes the crown for best black-and-white documents. Colour prints are also OK, though look closely and you’ll see where the paper has been fed through the rollers, and it’s also lacking the contrast of the 8160. For the price range, though, the HP Envy has it well and truly bested.

Scan speed for a single page is just over 50 seconds, which is slow, but the image result is reliable. The Canon offers the same cloud printing services as its stablemate, though you’ll have to make do with a smaller 3-inch touch screen and physical buttons, and also have to manually pull out and retract the paper output tray. A mild inconvenience, but one that’s common.