Canon Pixma iP6220D review

Despite being almost £20 more expensive than the HP Photosmart 8050, Canon's iP6220D doesn't feel that well-made and its covers and paper trays feel flimsy.

Even worse, the flap you open to get to the ink cartridges catches on the cover of the memory card reader. The paper input tray also looks pretty odd when extended and is fiddly to close up.

Like the 8050, the Canon has a built-in memory card reader that covers all common types of 2.5in card. There's an LCD screen as well, so that you can look at the photos on your cards. Oddly though, these don't fill the whole of the screen, so you lose some of the impact of its size. The display is also not as sharp or bright as that of the Photosmart 8050 and it's slow to respond, so each menu page seems to fade into the next.

The Pixma uses six inks for photo printing - two cartridges with three colours of inks in each. We were, however, amazed to discover that there's no optional black ink tank for printing text. That means that when you print a text document containing black text, the printer will have to mix the other colours to make a close approximation of black, which is very wasteful.

Canon couldn't tell us how many pages of black text the photo cartridge would produce, but we were able to print 216 copies of our formal letter before print quality started to fail. This works out at just under 9p per page, which is very expensive. To be fair though, the iP6220D is designed for printing photos not text and as a photo printer, it's much better value for money. Taking into account the cost of both colour cartridges, a single photo print costs 5.1p. That's not bad, but the HP's cost per photo print was only 2.9p per page.

The higher running costs of the Pixma might have been forgivable if it produced beautiful, pristine prints - sadly, it didn't. All of our test photos and colour images looked slightly washed out with too little contrast. This problem was most pronounced with photos printed directly from memory cards.