Canon Pixma iP4600 review

The old Pixma iP4500 has been our A List inkjet of choice for more than a year now, but Canon hasn't just bumped out a minor upgrade. The iP4600, in fact, blends the best bits from both its predecessor and the budget iP2600, while adding improved performance as well.

The boxy design of the iP4500 has been discarded in favour of the curves of the iP2600, albeit on a slightly larger scale. The rear flap opens out to hold 150 sheets, while there's also a cassette in the base with the same capacity again. The front paper catcher is the usual design, with a secondary arm that folds out for A4 documents. You won't find any luxuries like LCD displays here, just power and paper feed buttons on the right-hand front.

The iP4600 retains the same five-ink engine from its predecessor, albeit with slightly different part numbers for the cartridges. So you get the gloriously thick black text from the pigment-based tank without sacrificing the shadows and detail from your dye-based photos. Our test text document was crisp and exhibited no spidering, while draft-quality text - although thinner and more frayed - remained perfectly legible.

Colour documents were equally sharp, with just a slightly orangey red to keep the iP4600 from top marks. Solid areas of colour showed no unevenness, and boundaries between dark and light tones exhibited no bleeding at all. Photos were just as impressive for the price. While not quite up to the standard of the Canon MP610 all-in-one, our test images showed plenty of detail, good colour blending and accurate tones.

And they come out at quite a rate, too. A 6 x 4in print took just 46 seconds, a two-second improvement over the iP4500. Our A4 photomontage finished in a minute and 33 seconds, seven seconds quicker than its predecessor. Text showed no similar boost, coming at an identical 10ppm in standard mode, but colour documents came out at 4.4ppm, up from the iP4500's 3.9ppm.

So the printer itself is marginally quicker than the iP4500, but the flipside is that the price has risen a little, too. At £65 it's still a very affordable printer, though, and when you add in fact that the colour ink tanks are currently less than £8 each, it becomes a cheap printer to run, too - albeit a little dearer than its predecessor. The presence of an integrated, automatic duplexer and a CD/DVD printing tray is merely the cherry on top of the best affordable home inkjet we've seen.

Author: David Bayon