Canon Pixma MG6150

Canon has built quite a reputation for quality photo printing with its Pixma range. The MP990, which we reviewed in July, got a four-star rating for its solid all-round performance, and the MG6150 isn’t a bad printer either. It has a number of nifty features such as printing over WiFi and via flash-drive, but that’s what we’ve come to expect from any new printer in this price range.

The Pixma is designed for photo printing, and pictures we printed were of a high quality on glossy photo paper. The colours were true to the images on screen – one of the most accurate depictions of colour we’ve seen lately.

After much deliberation, though, we had to conclude that the MG6150’s prints couldn’t match the competing Epson Workforce 633 or Artisan 725 for detail. The Artisan was also capable of the same rich colours the Pixma is so good at – perhaps even better.

Printing colour photographs on plain paper, the Pixma was flat-out terrible. It emphasised existing graininess in photos, blurred out details and was incredibly patchy in dark areas. Most of our photo prints on plain paper were completely unusable for anything but packing material.

Copies were highly detailed but suffered from notable undersaturation, tending toward greyscale over several generations.

Monochrome text printing is not really what the Pixma is for, and this becomes pretty apparent when you compare plain word documents produced by the Pixma and other printers. The Pixma’s black is not pure black, which makes reading slightly more difficult, and like most inkjets it was also prone to smudging the text during and immediately after printing.

If you’re looking for a printer that does high-quality photos on photo paper, the Pixma is a good choice. If you’re primarily printing text and line art, you may want to consider something else.