Canon PIXMA TS6050

A compact and capable all-in-one printer

What is the Canon PIXMA TS6050?

There are two main uses for an all-in-one printer in the home: to print photos and to print documents. Canon’s PIXMA TS6050 majors on the second of these and makes it particularly easy to print from phones and mobile devices, as well as directly from the cloud.

Canon PIXMA TS6050 – Design and features

Canon has gone to some trouble to redesign its PIXMA range and reduce its desktop footprint. This machine is around 30 percent smaller than its predecessor and its neat styling helps to further reduce its impact on a given room.

The top of its all-black case is formed by the lid of its single-sheet flatbed scanner, with an extendable, near-vertical paper feed pulling up from the rear of the top surface, to feed up to 20 sheets of photo or plain paper. The main paper feed comes from a cassette which slides into the bottom of the front panel and this can take up to 100 sheets of plain paper, though photo blanks can’t be fed from here.

The main part of the front panel hinges upwards and has to be used in its horizontal orientation to allow for paper feed to its pull-out output tray. The panel contains a 75mm touchscreen which handles most of the machine’s controls, though with well-designed physical buttons for key features, including a house-shaped button to return to the home screen.

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Five, single-colour ink cartridges clip into place once you lift the scanner section and there’s a pigmented black ink for printing text on plain paper, as well as a dye-based one for intensifying the darker hues in photos.

Support software includes Canon’s Image Garden and Creative Park Premium applications and provides basic support for all the printer’s functions. There are free apps for iOS and Android which are simple and efficient, though NFC connection isn’t provided.

Canon PIXMA TS6050 – Print quality and speed

 
We had some trouble getting the Canon PIXMA TS6050 to print from its cassette and after some diagnosis tracked this down to it failing to pick paper correctly. Shuffling and reloading the paper appeared to sort this, though it was brand-new sheets of the same multi-purpose stock we have used for many years.

Canon rates the printer at 15ppm in mono and 10ppm colour. Our 5-page mono text document returned 7.5ppm, but this rose to 10.7ppm on the longer, 20-page test. The text and colour graphics document gave 3.9ppm, so none of our results came close to the claimed speeds. The colour print speed is quite slow for this class of machine.

Our 20-side duplex document returned 3.1 sides per minute, which is also pretty sluggish, largely due to 15 second pauses for ink-drying between front and back sides of each page. 15 x 10cm photos completed in around 50 seconds, which is the only impressive figure from these tests.

The quality of prints is pretty good, with intense black text on plain paper, clean, well-saturated colours in business graphics and less than normal lightening of colours in a colour copy. Photo images are sharp and natural, though some detail is lost in darker areas.

Ink cartridges are available in normal and high-yield versions and using the higher capacity consumables gives page costs of 3.0p for black and 7.4p for colour, neither of which is far from the device’s main competitors.

Should I buy the Canon PIXMA TS6050?

The design of this machine owes more to the lifestyle than enthusiast market, but there are rivals from all the main manufacturers that should also be considered. Brother offers the £130 MFC-J680DW, for example, with very similar specifications, but including a 20-sheet ADF for multi-page copying and fax.

Epson provides the £120 Expression Premium XP-640, with very similar specs, including twin paper trays, comparable speeds and good mobile connectivity. HP comes in with its £135 ENVY 7640, which also includes an ADF, higher capacity trays, fax and optional low-cost Instant Ink subscription.

Verdict

Canon’s PIXMA TS6050 is an all-in-one design for use with mobile devices and a PC. Although our review sample had an isolated paper feed problem, in general terms it’s easy-to-use and neat on desk or table. It’s neither the fastest nor cheapest all-in-one to run, though, in what is a very crowded section of the market.

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