Bottle-fed Canon rewrites the rules
Superb photos and low running costs
T he Canon Pixma G650 is the newest addition to Canon’s G-series of MegaTank printers that use bottles of ink poured into large tanks, rather than cartridges. And where previously you had to choose between low running costs of Canon’s MegaTanks or the superb photo print quality of its cartridgebased printers, the Pixma G650 promises to deliver both.
It achieves this trick by adding two more inks (red and grey) to the usual quartet of black, cyan, magenta and yellow. Despite this, it’s more compact and lighter than previous ink tank models. How? First, the G650 doesn’t come with a secondary paper tray – only a 100-sheet capacity rear paper feeder – and the copier is missing an automatic sheet feeder. Note there’s also a G550 model that doesn’t include a copier/scanner.
The control panel lives on top of the unit, so you can easily configure the printer while standing in front of it. It’s a standard two-line LCD display, with large copy buttons to manually initiate mono or colour copies, and a handful of buttons to help you navigate the built-in menus. It’s easy to use, but most of the time you’ll be controlling the printer from the device you’re printing from.
On that subject, you can connect the printer to a PC using its USB port, or add it to your wireless network if you want to print from a phone or tablet. There’s no Ethernet port and no option to print directly from a USB thumb drive.
Canon has taken a leaf out of Epson’s book when it comes to ink-tank filling, improving usability significantly. On older models, you had to match the ink bottle to the correct tank and squeeze the bottle to get the ink out, with nothing to prevent colour mismatches. Now each bottle has a moulded and keyed neck, so it can only be poured into the correct tank. Once the bottle is in place, the ink slowly glugs into the tank without being squeezed.
Printing from a PC is simple, linking seamlessly into Windows’ own p print tools. If y you want more, ,
Canon’s printer controls let you access extra functions. There are also apps available for helping you print from your mobile device, while Mac support is provided via AirPrint.
Although the option to print double-sided is present in Canon’s printer software, the G650 doesn’t do this automatically. Instead, the printer churns through the first side of the pages, then asks you to feed the output back into the rear paper tray. There’s plenty of guidance on which way round to stick the paper back in, but it’s not as straightforward as a printer that can perform this standard task automatically.
Now to the big question: do the two additional ink colours improve the print quality? The answer is a resounding yes. Printing photos onto standard glossy photo paper produced phenomenal results.
Pulling out the same photos printed on the cartridge-based Pixma TS8350 ( see issue 320,
p81) from our library of test prints, I could only see the difference with a magnifying glass. The colours are bold and bright, while black and dark tones are truly inky. Compared with the same photos from a Pixma G7050 ( see issue 320, p84) – the previous-generation fourcolour tank printer – the G650 is light years ahead. It also did a solid job of printing text and graphics.
Colour copies were more disappointing. They were severely washed out, which is probably due to the built-in scanner: it only offers
600 x 1,200ppi compared with 1,200 x 2,400ppi on the G7050 and TS8350. If scanning photos is important to you, choose a different printer.
Canon provides one bottle of each of the six colours needed with this p printer. According g to Canon’s q quoted yields, that should be enough to print 3,700 mono pages or 8,000 in colour. With replacement bottles of the same size costing £14 each, additional mono prints work out to 0.4p each, while colour prints cost 1p. This is more expensive than a four-colour MegaTank such as the G7050, where mono prints cost 0.2p and colour costs 0.4p. However, it’s still a much lower running cost than cartridges – for reference, the TS8350’s mono prints cost 3.4p each, while colour prints cost 6.2p.
The addition of two extra inks has destroyed any attempt the G650 might have made to win a medal for its speed, though. It took more than 30 seconds to print the first page of our test documents, and printing multiple pages did little to speed things up. Mono prints arrived at a relatively glacial pace of 3.4ppm (compared with the 10.4ppm you’ll get from a Pixma G7050), while colour prints wafted in at a rate of 2.2ppm. Still, this isn’t quite so far behind its predecessor, with the G7050 only getting to 2.4ppm.
So the Canon Pixma G650 has its compromises, primarily speed and scan quality.
However, the quality of photo printing has gone through the roof, going a long way towards matching the vibrancy and quality of prints previously only seen on Canon’s cartridge printers.
“Now to the big question: do the two additional ink colours improve the print quality? The answer is a resounding yes”