Canon PIXMA ix6550 A3 Colour Inkjet Printer

Canon's PIXMA iX6550 inkjet printer does not have a scanner, copier, automated document feeder, auto-duplex or other complicated circuitry to confuse you — all it will is print papers and photos from the small 6x4in dimensions completely to A3+. It's compact — hardly wider than an A3 sheet of report, rather than specially high or deep — and it is able to produce top quality print-outs with all the right paper and options. If you're printing papers it may be fairly fast, although photographs do simply take considerably longer and can chew through ink in a matter of various prints.

Canon PIXMA iX6550: Design and setup

There's not much to say regarding design front for the Canon PIXMA iX6550. The printer's human body is somewhat plasticky and flimsy-feeling. You load report through the top-loading cassette which is provided out onto a front tray. That's actually about all there was — aside from a power switch and a paper feed/eject option, the PIXMA iX6550 is a blank record. It is a glossy black box that picks up fingerprints remarkably rapidly. It's no fancy colour display screen (no screen anyway, in reality) and no buttons for navigating through menus or altering features regarding the printer itself. Likewise, there are no storage device slots or a USB number port for direct publishing. This is why, might clearly require a desktop PC or laptop connected to manage and print from the PIXMA iX6550.

The Canon PIXMA iX6550 has USB 2.0 connectivity but no Wi-Fi or Ethernet networking, which might vex anyone wanting to work it in a workplace is shared by multiple computer systems. You can do this in a roundabout means by revealing the printer right through the computer it's attached to, but this can be an awkward and substandard solution — if you probably have to share your printer between several computers the PIXMA iX6550 must not be towards the top of your list. Annoyingly for a $400 product the PIXMA iX6550 doesn't always have a USB 2.0 cable included, so that youwill need to hunt around locate one from your old printer or take a visit down to the shop and spend a few dollars much more. We hooked the Canon PIXMA iX6550 as much as our Apple MacBook Pro running both Windows and Mac OS X Lion making use of a USB 2.0 cable.

Canon PIXMA iX6550: Print rate, high quality and gratification

The PIXMA iX6550 is a no-nonsense printer: once you have started using it installed on your computer (Canon includes a sensibly bloated range of computer software, you could elect not to ever install it) the driver offers you several choose choices for modifying printing high quality and paper feeding, and that is it. Struck printing on your computer additionally the PIXMA iX6550 is installed and operating within several moments.

Canon's quoted numbers of 11.3 pages per minute for monochrome papers and 8.8 pages each minute for colour documents tend to be fairly near the figures we achieved. Over a 50 page printing run making use of an A4 colour test document we obtained a print rate of 7.2 pages each and every minute, while a greyscale version ended up being quicker at 9.8 pages each and every minute. A full-colour optimum high quality A3 image printing took 2min 21sec to perform. We did not time a maximum quality A3+ print run but we anticipate it to be over three . 5 mins per sheet.

The Canon PIXMA iX6550 features good printing high quality. That is most obvious when you're producing a sizable A3 or A3+ image, but it also means clean text on any kind of report down to all over 7pt text dimensions. Colour saturation is great on both documents and photos, in Draft high quality, but ramping as much as maximum high quality does come at the expense of quickly-empty ink tanks.

The ink charges for the Canon PIXMA iX6550 are not especially reasonable but not dramatically higher than contending models from Brother and Epson — much more vital that you us may be the PIXAM iX6550's fairly large preliminary cost. All the five ink tanks costs $23.95 RRP, so purchasing a whole new full refill is expensive. If you're just likely to be printing monochrome documents the PGI-525BK pigment black will work for 335 sheets, additionally the combined color inks are good for approximately 500 pages.

Canon PIXMA iX6550: Conclusion

The Canon PIXMA iX6550 does a beneficial task of printing A4 and A3 documents and colour pictures. We do not have any real difficulties with it aside from the a little plasticky build quality and decreased USB cable — otherwise it acquits itself really as a reliable if somewhat high priced single-user printer.