EDITOR’S CHOICE
The baddest one-piece print squad that ever hit town
We’d heard great things about Canon’s Pixma MG6250, so were pretty excited when the test unit arrived in the MacUser offices. And we’re delighted to report that this photo inkjet all-in-one printer didn’t disappoint.
It’s certainly one of the best-equipped photo inkjets around, with five dye-based inks for photo printing, a dedicated pigmented black cartridge for document printing, and versatile connectivity via 10/100Base-T Ethernet, wifi and USB, as well as the usual PictBridge and memory card slots. Two paper trays can each handle up to 150 sheets of plain A4. Both can take photo paper, and the type of paper in each tray is auto-detected. The MG6250’s Direct Print feature also lets you print directly onto compatible CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs. And if that wasn’t enough, it supports AirPrint, which means you can print directly from iOS devices.
Unlike Lexmark and HP, Canon doesn’t provide full app centres for its printers, but the MG6250 isn’t lacking in bells and whistles. The large colour screen makes it easy to preview images for direct printing and scanning using memory cards or PictBridge. And the touch panel on the top shows different buttons depending on which of its features you’ve selected.
Photo printing is the MG6250’s most obvious strength. It has a dedicated grey cartridge alongside its dye-based black, cyan, magenta and yellow ink tanks. This meant it could produce black-and-white photos with true monochrome shading, rather than having to create composite grey tones from the other colours. Colour photos also looked stunning, with fine detail, vivid colour and beautiful shading.
They printed quickly, too: our full-quality 6 × 4in borderless photos took about 50 seconds each to appear. Document printing was also fairly quick, at 8.8ppm for mono text, 3.5ppm for illustrated colour and 2.5ppm for a duplex version of the same colour document.
For duplex printing in particular, you may want to use heavier 100gsm paper rather than cheaper 80gsm or lighter copier paper, as we found that ink could leave heavily printed areas a little wrinkled. Once again, prints were sharp and smoothly shaded all round.
Copy quality was also excellent, with good black-and-white reproduction of dark areas and only a slight touch of graininess in colour copies.
The MG6250’s scanner has a high optical resolution of 4800 × 4800dpi and a wide colour gamut. It managed an accurate reproduction of our test image’s subtle shading, even in high-contrast areas. We were also impressed by the clarity of finely detailed areas, such as the iris of an eye. We’re fans of Canon’s versatile scanner interface, which retains previews and settings, as well as allowing you massive control over colour and image correction in its advanced settings.
Like other printer makers, Canon is providing support for cloud-based printing, primarily via Google’s Cloud Print service. You can use Canon’s new Pixma Cloud Link service, or link the MG6250 with your Canon Image Gateway and Picasa web accounts.
The MG6250 will be very tempting for keen photographers, while its high-quality image printing and high-resolution scanner also make it an appealing option for those who want to archive or copy at high quality. For under £140, it has all the features you need, plus reasonable mono print costs of 2.9p per mono page.
The slightly high 8.2p per mixed-colour page cost is the only slight drawback. Canon’s Pixma MG5350 costs less to run, but it can’t match the speed and quality that make the MG6250 our Editor’s Choice.
Labs Team
Price: £139 inc VAT
From: printerbase.co.uk
Info: Canon
Pro: Astonishing photo, print, and scan quality + Fast + Supports AirPrint so you can print from iOS devices
Con: Slightly high mixed-colour cost
