Canon Pixma IP4600 Printer Review

It is unusual for a top of the line printer to cost below £75, but the canon Pixma ip4600, which is a high-end inkjet, is offered at this price. It is essentially an all-in-one machine without the scanner. The majority of the other sorts of functions you’d anticipate in a Canon all-in-one are here.

This machine is coated mostly in a high-gloss piano black finish, which is standard on most Canon inkjets, looks good until you get fingerprints on it. It is smaller compared to previous Canon printers; however, this means that the paper tray, which set underneath the printer, sticks out at the front. Even though the output tray obscures it, if the front cover is open, it appears less streamlined while the printer’s shut. When the top cover is folded-up, a rear tray becomes available.

There are only two control buttons for power and paper feed/resume, which built on the curved right edge of the front panel and one single USB socket on the back. A PictBridge socket, for direct camera connection, sits beneath the controls. An inner hinged cover folds down to become the guide for the CD/DVD carrier, and this allows you to print directly on printable discs.

The five ink cartridges can easily be accessed when you lift the top cover. Canon offers two black ink cartridges, one pigmented (PGI-520BK) for stable and black text, and one dye-based (CLI-521BK) that is compatible with other colors. As you clip each cartridge in place, a red led shows it correctly located; it also flashes if the ink is getting low.

As expected, the print speeds are on the positive side. Claimed rates of 12.8ppm and 11.2ppm for black and white and color respectively for best mode, while we managed 5.45ppm and 4.05ppm in normal print mode, on our 5-page test prints. Even at a 20-page work, far higher than the standard for office or home documents, the black page speed is only 5.77 ppm, still not close to the given figure.

Photo printing, on the other hand, is more than respectable, producing a 15 x 10 photo in just 58 seconds in best print mode and 50 seconds on the standard way through PictBridge.

The PIXMA iP4600 is equipped with an automatic duplex, although we are not that impressed on the way it works. First is the hold off between printing first and second sides. After printing the first side, the machine stops for about 5 seconds to allow the ink to dry before printing the second side; therefore our twenty-side document required 8 minutes and 14 seconds to complete, as the single-sided version of a similar job only took 3mins 28secs, under half the time.

The second thing is the fact that duplex documents seem to be printed making use of the dye-based black ink cartridge; either that or perhaps they’re printed ‘light’ using the pigmented ink. No matter which it is, the duplex pages looked a lot greyer, pretty much-looking draft in comparison with single-sided ones. Both of these issues significantly reduce the positive aspects of double-sided printing.

The result of our single-sided test prints looked outstanding. The black text is sharp and well-defined with no signs of feathering of the pigmented ink. The color graphics were also excellent, and it looked vibrant with better color registration of black text over color compared to the ones we saw on the Pixma iP4500.

Regardless of the printing speed, the photos looked natural and accurate, with lots of detail in both bright and dark areas.