Canon PIXMA iX5000 review

An A4 printer is fine for most home and office purposes, but photography and graphical arts demand larger prints.

Canon's PIXMA iX5000 inkjet prints on paper up to A3+ (329x483mm), so it's a good compromise between an A4 printer and an expensive large-format device.

The iX5000 costs less than photo-orientated A3+ inkjets such as Epson's Stylus Photo R1800 (reviewed in What's New, Shopper July 2005) or Canon's i9950, (reviewed in What's New, Shopper November 2004). Canon says it can produce lab-quality photos, but it prints with only four inks and has a low resolution.

The iX5000 doesn't look especially exciting, but it's neat and seems tough. Its paper input tray is well engineered and can hold up to 150 sheets of plain paper, but there's no option to use roll paper. The output tray feels similarly robust, and supports A3 paper to prevent curling.

As with many other PIXMA printers, setting up the iX5000 involves fitting its print head before slotting in the ink cartridges. It uses PGI-5BK pigment black ink and the CLI-8 cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges used in many current A4 PIXMA devices. In our tests on the PIXMA iP4200 for Labs, Shopper May 2006, these three cartridges lasted for an average of 93 A4 photos; however, an A3+ page has two-and-a-half times the area.

We were unimpressed with the quality and speed of the test photos printed by the iX5000. On Canon's Photo Paper Pro, prints had a green bias. Dark colours were milky and lacked the intensity of results from the Epson Stylus Photo R1800, though they improved as they dried. There wasn't too much visible grain, but the paper's surface showed fine trackwheel marks and light parallel scoring after it had passed through the printer. A borderless A3+ photo took 17 minutes and 49 seconds to print at the highest quality setting.

While the iX5000 might not be a great photo printer, it was quite capable on plain paper. It was swift to print good-quality draft text and produced crisp correspondence-quality black text at an impressive 6.4 A4 pages per minute (ppm). Colour prints were less bold than from the best inkjets, but appeared quickly.

The iX5000 printed the first 10 pages of our mixed-colour test on A3 paper in just over eight minutes, quicker than some A4 inkjets we've tested. After a couple more pages, however, printed pages began to tuck under others in the output tray, confusing the correct order.

If you're a professional or keen amateur photographer, we'd recommend the extra speed of Epson's Stylus Photo R1800, and the higher durability and quality of its prints. But if you need an A3 printer that gives good graphical results on plain paper and you don't need to print from paper rolls, the iX5000 is a more affordable alternative.