Canon Pixma iP4600 Ink Review

It is out of the ordinary for a top-of-the-range 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 alll-in-one machine withought the scanner. Most of the other sorts of functions you'd anticipate in a Canon all-in-one are here.



Like This machine is coated mostly in high-gloss piano black finish which is common on the majority of Canon inkjets, looks good until you get finger prints on it. It is smaller compared to a few previous Canon printers, but this means the paper cassette, which fits under the printer, sticks out the front. Although it's obscured by the output tray if the front cover is open, it looks less sleek while the printer is shut. There's a second paper source, a rear tray brought into play when you fold up the top cover.

There are just two control buttons, for power and paper feed/resume, built into the curved right edge of the front panel and a single USB socket at the rear. A PictBridge port, 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 lets you print directly upon printable discs.

Installation of the Canon Pixma iP4600 printer cartridges as well as the permanent print heads are very simple, just lift-up the top cover and just properly set the print heads and the five ink cartridges into place. Canon provides 2 black ink cartridges, one pigmented (PGI-520BK) for deep and black text, as well as one dye-based (CLI-521BK) and this is compatible with other colours. When you set each cartridge in place, a red led light will indicate if it is properly set; additionally, it flashes once the ink is getting low.

Print speeds, as usual, are on the optimistic side. Claimed speeds of 12.8ppm and 11.2ppm for black and white and colour respectively for best mode, although we managed 5.45ppm and 4.05ppm in normal print mode, on our five-page test prints. Even on the 20-page job, a lot larger than is common for home or office documents, the speed of the black page just went up to 5.77ppm, still not near to the given amount.

In contrast, the photo prints are pretty good, taking merely 58 seconds to produce a 15 x 10 print in best print mode and 50 seconds on standard mode through pictbridge.

The PIXMA iP4600 features an automatic duplex, however we are not that impressed on the way it works. First is the delay between printing the first and second sides. To allow for ink drying, the machine halts for around five seconds at the end of printing the first side, therefore our twenty-side document took 8 minutes and 14 seconds to complete, while the single-sided version of a similar job only took 3mins 28secs, under half the time.

Next is the fact that duplex documents seems to be printed making use of the dye-based black ink; either that or perhaps they're printed 'light' with 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 aspects significantly bring down the positive aspects of the double-sided printing.

The quality of the single-sided prints we produced was very good. Black text is crisp and clean, with no visible feathering of the pigmented ink. Colour graphics are also good, with vibrant colours and better registration of black text over colour than 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.

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