Handsome prints
With its stylish, low-profile design, you
could be forgiven for mistaking Canon’s PIXMA MG6350 for its cheaper stalemate,
the MG6350 and these two all-in-ones do indeed share many features. Both have
two paper input trays and support duplex (double-sided_ printings, and they
share the same high print (9600 x 2400dpi) and scan (2400 x 4800dpi)
resolutions. However, while both devices have wireless networking and AirPrint
support for printing from your iOS devices, only the MG6350 has a wired
Ethernet port, which could help speed up high-resolution scans over the
network. And it comes in white, as well as the standard black model.
Joy
of six: The 6350 churns out really rather nice colors
The MG6350 has a sophisticated touch-screen
interface, which uses smartphone-like touch and swipe gestures to navigate its
various functions. The touchscreen is surrounded by a dark panel on which
various other touch-sensitive buttons light up only when they’re relevant,
which helps keep things simple.
This printer takes six ink cartridges,
comprising a black pigment ink for text, and black, grey, cyan magenta and
yellow cartridges for high-quality color prints. They’re accessed via a rather
clever, lift-up control panel, but you can’t easily see the rear of the ink
carrier, so you have to insert cartridges partly by feel. Neither can you tilt
the screen or the controls, which could be frustrating if you’re using the
printer on a shelf near eye level.
Black
text looked as good as the output from a laser device; color prints were
equally sharp
When you start a print job, the printer’s
front panel pops open, with a support swinging out to form an output tray. You
need to extend the support manually to cope with A4 paper, but it’s only about
an inch wide, which means large quantities of paper can quickly get untidy,
ruining the sleek lines if the case, and the support must be retracted before
you can re-close the front panel. Two shallow paper trays slung under the
printer hold 125 sheets of plain paper and up to 20 sheets of photo media.
High specifications don’t always translate
into great results, but they do in the case of the MG6350. It’s a swift text
printer, delivering our 20-page text test at 13ppm, but slightly less
impressive when it comes to color graphics, reaching only 2.6ppm in our test.
To the naked eye, black text looked as good
as the output from a laser device, while color prints on plain paper were
equally sharp and reasonably bold. Color and greyscale photocopies were both
and 12 seconds respectively. While this isn’t the fastest photo printer we’ve
encountered – six 1200dpi 6 x 4in photos took one minute 17 seconds – the
results from the six-ink system were superb, particularly when it came to
reproducing shade detail. Our black-and-white test print was excellent with a
very neutral color – color – so much so that we suspect only grey and black
inks were used to create it.
The
PIXMA MS6350 is a great little all-in-one
With a price per page of 5.4p per A4 color
page, it’s not the cheapest printer to run, though.
Scan times weren’t particularly fast when
the MG6350 was connected over our congested wireless network, but when we
switched to USB; it was very quick at resolutions up to and including 600dpi.
Scan quality was good: images were in sharp focus and exhibited a wide dynamic
range.
The PIXMA MS6350 is a great little
all-in-one. It’s not especially is a great little all-in-one. It’s not especially
cheap to buy or run, but it’s worth it for those who want the best-quality
results.
|
Specifications
·
Inkjet all-in-one
·
Needs: OS X 10.5.8 – 10.8
·
Pro: Good-looking, fast, quality prints
·
Con: Not cheap to run
·
Price: $189
·
Verdict: 4/5
|
