Canon Pixma iP4600 review

Canon's Pixma iP4600 is the replacement for the Best Buy-winning iP4500.

It looks more streamlined than its predecessor, with a silver bevelled edge around the top, but it's basically the same functional, compact and unobtrusive shape. A PictBridge port allows you to print from a digital camera, but this printer isn't designed with direct photo-printing in mind. There are no memory card slots and it doesn't have a built-in screen. However, it has an automatic duplexer, which most inkjets at this price lack.

The iP4600 has a separate print head, which is also unusual for an inkjet at this price. The benefit is that it can be replaced in the event of it becoming irreparably clogged. This also means that cartridges will generally cost slightly less than those that have built-in print heads. Ink cartridges slot into position easily, and a red LED comes on to indicate when they're correctly fitted. There are two black cartridges. The larger PGI-520BK contains enough pigmented black ink to print around 350 A4 pages. Pigmented ink gives sharp, deep black text and dries quickly on plain paper to prevent smudging. The smaller CLI-521BK cartridge contains dye-based black for photo printing.

Plain A4 paper can be loaded into either the rear upright paper tray or the cartridge-style tray at the front of the printer, but only the rear tray can handle thicker photographic papers. After installing the driver, we were prompted to connect a USB cable and allow the iP4600 to perform a print-head alignment, which took around 10 minutes.

Like its predecessors, the iP4600 has an automatic duplexer and a CD/DVD printing tray. Inkjet duplexers are never particularly fast, but we were quite pleased with the print time of two minutes, 35 seconds for 10 pages of draft duplex printing. Unfortunately, duplex print quality at the printer's fastest draft setting seemed jagged compared to the smoother lettering of single-sheet draft prints.

The quality of standard single-sided draft prints is easily good enough for everyday use and they printed at a swift 9.4ppm. The darker standard-quality text was sharp enough to rival the laser printers in this month's group test and printed at a speed of 6ppm. Even 5pt text was easy to read and an 11-second time to first page matches most lasers.

Bright, solidly shaded mixed-colour prints emerged at a rate of 2.9ppm. Printing 6x4in photos from the iP4600's four dye-based ink tanks took 54 seconds each and looked good enough to rival most six-ink photo printers we've seen. Colours looked natural, black areas were rich and skin tones realistic, and the prints exhibited a glossy, lab-quality shine.

The Pixma iP4600 presents few surprises when compared to the high standard of previous models in the same series. Photo quality is slightly improved, but we were disappointed to find that print speeds, although fast, failed to match those of the older Pixma iP4500, which achieved 9.8ppm for standard-quality mono prints, compared to the iP4600's 6ppm. Ink costs have risen recently, and the pre-release prices of cartridges for this printer produce a high mixed colour and black cost of 8.4p per page. This could drop if retailers sell the cartridges cheaper, so we'll bring you an update on our website when they're available to buy.

If you can find the now-discontinued iP4500 at a knock-down price it's well worth snapping one up, but with stocks virtually exhausted, the iP4600 is a great alternative all-rounder for home use. It just misses out on full marks due to the slower speeds and higher print costs.