Canon Pixma G4510

Canon printer fires blanks

We’ve been fairly impressed by the progress of Epson’s Ecotank bottlerefilled inkjet printers (see our review, Issue 528, page 22), even if they are so expensive that it’ll take you several thousand pages to benefit from the lower cost of ink. This model from Canon’s rival Pixma G series is cheaper, although we couldn’t find any retailers beating the manufacturer’s own price.

The G4510’s big, robust case and old-fashioned control panel, with lots of buttons and a calculator-style LCD screen instead of the colour touchscreen you’d expect nowadays, mark this out as a product you’d choose only for mundane practical reasons. There aren’t many frills to speak of. Neither the printer nor the top-mounted scanner, with its 20-page document feeder, offer duplex (doublesided) output, and although Wi-fi and online printing are supported you only get a USB 2.0 wired connection, not Ethernet. Fax is included in case you’re buying a printer for the prefab office in the corner of a scrap-metal yard in an old episode of Minder.

Printing was slow in our teststests, barely reaching eight pages per minute (ppm) for black text and 2ppm for colour graphics on plain paper. Quality was fine for these documents, but photo printing wasn’t great – you’d expect better from a a much cheaper inkjet. Although the scanner isn’t very high resolution, the results for everyday purposes were excellent. At 16 seconds for one page, or nearly three minutes for 10, photocopying wasn’t particularly quick, and colour more than doubled these times.

The trade-off is that you get over 6,000 pages’ worth of ink included (or 2,000 postcard-sized photos). So despite the fact that the G4510 is about five times more expensive than the kind of bog-standard multi-function printer that has similar features, you’ll start saving money after printing only half of those pages. That really highlights how expensive ink cartridges are. Even if you bought unofficial refills for a standard inkjet, it would eventually work out pricier. When topping up, Canon’s bottles don’t prevent you inserting the wrong colour, but we found them simple to use.

It’s good to see Canon making the ink tank system more affordable – the range starts at £170 for the G1510 (without a scanner). But the upfront cost still feels high for a basic printer.

Refillable ink makes it cheap to run, but it’s basic for this price

This is one of the new HDR (high dynamic range) monitors, designed to bring more depth to images rather than just more pixels. In fact, it’s decidedly average on the pixel front, providing a conventional 2560x1440.

Living room TVS have usually worked at lower resolutions than computer screens, because they only had to show moving pictures rather than text and user interfaces. But both are now moving to very sharp 4K. Philips itself sells a bigger 43in 4K HDR TV for a lower price, so why not buy that? Well, apart from the fact that with a 43in screen on your desk it’ll get tiring turning your gaze from one side to the other, TVS generally smear colour more noticeably. You wouldn’t see that watching Antiques Roadshow, but you would when trying to read small text.

Philips reckons this monitor covers 100 per cent of the SRGB colour space, and 99 per cent of the larger Adobe RGB, preferred by graphic designers. Our test meter found only 90 per cent of SRGB, but gave an excellent Delta E accuracy score of 1.09. Anything below 2 is decent. A more conservative reading of 91 per cent of Adobe RGB still beats most monitors, with a superb Delta E of 0.87. Sadly, uneven backlighting made the corners up to 20 per cent dimmer, which is useless for full-screen photo- or video editing, and with the limited resolution you wouldn’t want to confine previews to a smaller area.

You’ll need a graphics card with 10bit output to take advantage of HDR, which worked fine with the compatible games and programs we tried. Online services are introducing HDR films and TV shows, but as yet this often only works via TV boxes; Netflix supports PCS, but only those with recent processors and graphics cards. And Windows itself still doesn’t handle HDR properly, making the desktop and other software look pale.

It’s good for TV and film viewing, but less so for creative work