Canon PIXMA iX6850 review

Canon’s new PIXMA iX6850 is an inkjet printer capable of handling paper up to A3+ (329x483mm). It’s pitched as an office printer but, with its maximum resolution of 9,600×2,400 dots per inch (dpi) and five-ink print engine, it should be capable of delivering high-quality glossy photos on coated paper.

The iX6850 has the typical good looks of the PIXMA range, and is made from high-quality glossy black plastic. It feels like a solid product, with proper paper input and output trays that extend to almost fully support sheets of A3+ paper, and which have minimal flex when heavily loaded. Both can be partially retracted when you’re using smaller paper sizes, but when fully extended the iX6850 needs lots of desk space.

It’s a shame there’s no duplexer, but the driver will help you do it manually

There’s no automatic duplex (double-sided) printing, but the iX6850 supports both wired and wireless networks. Although there’s no display, Canon has thought of a neat new cable-free way to configure Wi-Fi for those without a WPS router. It worked perfectly for us, but unfortunately we couldn’t say the same for the Wi-Fi itself, which was slow and unreliable in our tests. After a couple of failures we switched to a wired connection, which worked fine.

The iX6850 delivered our 25-page letter test at 12.4 pages per minute (ppm), and completed our more demanding colour graphics test at a respectable 4ppm. A3 printing was rapid, with the printer despatching five mono pages in 51 seconds, and five graphics-rich colour pages in just under two minutes. The results were very good, with crisp, dark text and reasonably powerful, vice-free graphics.

Shortcuts help you quickly pick the right settings for everyday jobs

The iX6850 prints extremely good photographs, with razor-sharp details and neatly controlled shading. While perhaps not a match for photo-focused alternatives such as the PIXMA Pro range (see Group Test, Shopper 307), this is a surprisingly competent photo printer, particularly given its support for borderless prints at all sizes up to A3+. One fly in the ointment is that the photo printing speed is only middling. At highest quality, each postcard-sized photo took two minutes.

We’re used to seeing office inkjets that are cheaper to run than laser printers, and the iX6850 is no exception. Stick to the XL cartridges and the black component of a full-colour A4 page will cost around 2.1p, while the colour component will cost about 4.7p.

With reasonable costs, good results and a decent turn of speed, the iX6850 ought to be a winner, but its lack of a duplexer and comparatively poor Wi-Fi performance count against it. It’s also fairly expensive. The HP Officejet 7610, an A3 multifunction with fax that would probably be more useful to a typical small business.