Canon Pixma TS6250
A brilliant MFP for general and creative use in the home, and you won’t get ripped off by its running costs
SCORE PRICE £67 (£80 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/298can
Canon’s Pixma TS6250 is a three-in-one inkjet multifunction aimed at general and more creative use in the home. While it doesn’t have business features such as a fax or automatic document feeder, it can duplex print, which is handy for saving paper or producing more professional-looking multipage documents. The TS6250’s wireless connection makes it easy to share throughout the home, and it enables a wide range of mobile and cloud-based applications. Control comes via a useful 7.5cm colour touchscreen, although there’s no front-facing USB or SD card slot for direct photo prints.
Made from classy-looking black plastic, the TS6250 is smart enough to install in the lounge near to more expensive home audio equipment. It’s fairly compact, although pushing it back against a wall will block the rear paper feed, which you can otherwise use for up to 100 pages of plain or 20 sheets of photo paper. In the base, the regular tray handles up to 100 sheets of plain paper only. Loading paper is simple, but the printer won’t feed from the rear if you’ve forgotten to push down the guide rollers.
This printer uses Canon’s five-ink system, which combines the usual cyan, magenta and yellow with both a pigment black ink for plain paper and a dye-based black for photos. The former allows for bold black text and graphics, while the latter means photos print with a true black, rather than one composed of cyan, magenta and yellow. The consumable range is available in three sizes – standard, XL and XXL – with a page of mixed text and graphics costing about 8.6p when using the largest and best-value supplies. At 2.8p, the black component is higher than ideal.
The Pixma TS6250 is slightly less sophisticated than its sleek looks suggest, however. When printing, there’s a faint but persistent wheezing noise, as though the heads are gently scraping the paper as it passes through. It’s not the fastest, but at 12.7ppm for black text and 3.9ppm in
our complex colour graphics test, it won’t keep you waiting for too long. While it took nearly 11 minutes to print two 10 x 8in photos on A4 paper, each borderless 10 x 15cm print shot out in about 40 seconds.
Canon’s venerable scan interface has barely changed in a decade, but it’s our favourite, offering a basic mode for quick work and an advanced mode for more precise control. The latter offers a full range of useful features such as descreening and dust and scratch removal, but remains intuitive and easy. An A4 preview completed in just seven seconds, while a scan at 300dpi needed 16 seconds. Both times are competitive, if not the fastest, but it took us 31 seconds to scan a 10 x 15cm photo at 600dpi, and a minute and 40 seconds to do the same at 1,200dpi – many competitors are quicker.
This MFP’s touchscreen isn’t the sharpest or the most responsive, but its menu system generally lets you get the job done without frustration. Photocopies are easy to manage and quick, with a mono A4 copy needing just 12 seconds and a colour page 22 seconds. Cloud support includes printing photos from a Facebook or Instagram account, or scanning documents to (and printing them from) file services including OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox.
This MFP’s true strength lies in the quality of its results. On plain paper, black text was crisp and dark, while graphics were bright and punchy, without any inkjet bugbears such as grain or banding. That’s less true for duplex prints, however – by default they’re printed with less ink to prevent smearing and are thus more faint, but you can adjust the setting. Photocopies exhibited reasonable colour accuracy and preserved plenty of detail.
The TS6250’s sharp and detailed photos were generally excellent, but their warm colour bias suited certain subjects better than others. Scans were sharply focused with accurate colours, and their high dynamic range preserved details across the full range of light and dark shades.
While it’s not the fastest device, the TS6250 is quick enough across all its functions. It’s also smart to look at and easy to use, whether from a PC, mobile device or its touchscreen. With great results and acceptable running costs, it’s an easy home MFP to recommend.