Canon Pixma G650

Six appeal

Picture-perfect ink-tank printer

INKJET PRINTER | £249 from Wilkinson Cameras www.snipca.com/38817

Excellent photograph-print quality at a very reasonable price

The Canon Pixma G650 is the newest addition to Canon’s G-series of Megatank printers. It’s a multifunctional printer, scanner and copier that uses bottles of ink poured into large tanks, rather than traditional cartridges.

The Megatank range has always offered great value printing, but it used to be at the expense of print quality. However, the G650 solves the dilemma with exceptional photo-printing. It achieves this by adding two more inks (red and grey) to the usual quartet of black, cyan, magenta and yellow, making six in total.

You can connect the printer to a computer using its USB port, or add it to your Wi-fi network if you want to share it – or also print from a phone or tablet. There’s a control panel on top, with large copy buttons to start mono or colour copies, and a handful of buttons to help you navigate the built-in menus.

Printing directly from a computer is straightforward, linking seamlessly with Windows’ own print tools. If you want more, Canon’s own printer-configuration tools let you access extra functions, such as the option to print on both sides of a sheet of paper.

However, unlike previous models in the series, this can no longer be done automatically. Instead, the printer churns through the first side of every page, then asks you to feed the output back into the rear paper tray. While there’s plenty of guidance on which way round to stick the paper back in, it’s not as easy as a printer that can perform this task automatically.

However, any flaws are vastly outweighed by its two core strengths – the quality of its photo prints and the price of printing. We tested the photo printing with our standard test images and the results compare very favourably to good-quality cartridge printers. Next to photo prints from previous Megatank models, the quality is light years ahead.

The two extra ink colours means it’s not quite as cheap to run as the older four-colour models. We worked out that, once you’ve run through the supplied ink (which will take you some time because the starter bottles will print 3,700 mono pages and 8,000 colour), subsequent prints will cost around 0.4p each for mono and 1p for colour.

That’s more expensive than previous Megatank models, but still significantly cheaper than the average price per page from cartridge-based inkjet printers.

VERDICT Finally, an ink-tank printer that can print photos with the same quality as cartridge-based models and still offer great value running costs

ALTERNATIVE Canon Pixma G3501 £255 The four-colour version isn’t as good od at printing photos, but it’s cheaper to run (0.2p per page in mono, 0.4p in colour)