Canon PIXMA TS4150i Review

Introduction

The PIXMA TS4150i is the most basic of three new inkjet multifunction peripherals (MFPs) from Canon.

It’s a three-in-one, covering print, scan and copying, which should be fine for most home users. While some previous PIXMAs have been quite stylish, the Canon PIXMA TS4150i is beige – literally and metaphorically.

Still, this isn’t an ugly MFP, and it’s quite squat and compact. You can connect it via USB, or share it over your wireless network. It’s as happy printing photos as it is emails or office documents, so is it the bargain it looks?

Design and Features

• Compact, but not especially stylish
• Basic paper handling, except for duplex prints
• Very expensive to run

For around £60, the Canon PIXMA TS4150i isn’t the cheapest MFP you can buy, but it’s not far from it. With that in mind, its support for wireless networks and automatic duplex (double-sided) printing is welcome. You’ll be able to connect and share it among family members, and print professional-looking documents – or just save paper – by printing on both sides.

Other than that, there’s not much here to get excited about. This MFP has a basic paper cassette in the bottom that holds up to 100 sheets of plain paper. There’s no second tray, so if you want to print photos or on some headed paper, you’ll need to unload the tray and add in special media. Canon says the TS4150i prints at up to 14 pages per minute (ppm) in black, or 9ppm in colour – not bad, but read on to find out how it did in our tests.

This MFP’s scanner tops out at 1,200 dots per inch (dpi) resolution, which is certainly all you’ll need to scan office documents, or get a good copy of a photo. At this level of detail, a 15x10cm (6×4”) shot produces a 34 megapixel image – several times good enough to capture holiday snaps. I should point out that this MFP doesn’t fax, and there’s no automatic document feeder (ADF) on top to help with multi-page copies or scans. If you need one, think about spending more on a more office-focused device.

Cheap printers aren’t always the bargain they might seem, as in most cases you’ll pay more for ink than on more expensive models. Unfortunately, that’s absolutely the case here. The Canon PIXMA TS4150i uses two cartridges, one containing black ink, and a second with the cyan, magenta and yellow it needs to make up a full-colour page. These are expensive. Even when calculated for the high-yield supplies – rated for 300 black and 300 colour pages – running costs work out at a steep 9.2p per colour page, and an incredible 8.6p per black page.

That’s too much, to put it bluntly, but there is hope: this printer is compatible with Canon’s PIXMA Print Plan ink subscriptions, using which you can drop costs as low as 4.5p per page – black, colour or photo. It’s worth being aware that that’s the optimum, though: if you go over your allowance you’ll pay 10p per page, while any unused pages roll over only for one month. I prefer printers to have affordable cartridges, so that signing up for an ink plan comes down to consumer choice rather than a necessity.

Print speed and quality

• Excellent print and scan quality
• Decent photos
• Swift, rather than fast

Fortunately, the news turns positive again when you explore this MFP’s performance. The Canon PIXMA TS4150i is far from the quickest multifunction I’ve tested, but it has a decent turn of speed given its low price. It could print a first page of text in about 12 seconds, and a first colour page in 14 seconds, before going on to hit 10.3ppm over our five-page job. At its fastest, the TS4150i reached 12.2ppm over 20 pages of text, while it got to 6.3ppm when printing colour graphics.

The TS4150i didn’t make me wait too long for photocopies, with black and white pages completing in 14 seconds, and colour pages coming along in 20 seconds. I was less impressed with its scan speeds, however, which ranged from a leisurely 30 seconds for a 150 dots-per-inch (dpi) A4 scan, through to fully six minutes for a 1,200dpi scan of a postcard-sized photo. I’m fairly sure that’s the slowest performance I’ve ever tested.

Happily, the quality was generally excellent. Inkjets never quite match laser printers for text quality, but the Canon PIXMA TS4150i is among the best, producing dark black characters with sharp outlines. It’s also one of the best inkjets I’ve seen for graphics printing on plain paper, delivering impressively punchy colours without particularly obvious graining. It’s also not a bad photo printer, though not quite up to the standards of Canon’s best.

They may have taken a while, but this MFP’s scan results were strong. Normal documents were sharply focused and nicely exposed, while photos remained quite detailed, without the loss of too much detail in very light or dark areas.

Should you buy it?

FAQs

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