Canon PIXMA MG6150 review

A few scratches can’t spoil the effect when you turn the printer on, though. Icons drift into the 7.5cm screen as though entering from the wings, coalescing into a menu while the surrounding touch controls ripple into life. Unfortunately, the menu system proved rather fiddly. The cursor controls are quite a distance from the screen and instead of a single, central action button there are three that line up with on-screen icons.

Fortunately, print quality came to the rescue. With pigmented black ink, the printer produces crisp and absolutely black characters that look almost as good as those from a laser. While swift, it’s not especially fast on plain paper – 24 pages of colour graphics took just under seven minutes, equivalent to 3.5ppm. Given this comparative lack of urgency we were impressed by the rate at which it could reel off photos, despatching six postcard-sized prints in less than five minutes and two 10×8 inch prints in just three and a half.

The MG6150 prints excellent photos. While they don’t embarrass those from four-ink models, there’s more subtlety to the colours, which are rich without appearing too saturated. They’re not perfect, however, and we narrowly preferred those from the Epson PX720WD.

While the MG6150’s scanner is very good, it can’t quite match the one in the PX720WD. It’s a little quicker, with a 1,200dpi photo scan taking just 44 seconds, and it has a higher maximum optical resolution, but the Epson has the edge when it comes to preserving detail in the darkest regions.

Overall, there’s little between this MFP and the Epson Stylus Photo PX720WD. The MG6150 is a good alternative if you need high-quality text printing, but the slightly cheaper Epson is a better photo printer, and quite a bit cheaper to run.