Canon Pixma TS9050 review: Brilliant, but expensive

Canon’s TS9050 is the flagship of the PIXMA range. It looks marvellous, with lovely high-gloss white panels and a huge touch control panel, but then, at the thick end of £200, it ruddy well ought to.

Appearances aside, it’s not immediately clear why the TS9050 costs twice as much as a good home inkjet. As you’d probably expect, it supports wired and wireless networks, can print from an SD card and can duplex print, but that’s nothing you can’t get for much less. So what’s Canon playing at?

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Canon Pixma TS9050: Features and specifications

You need to dig a little deeper to find what you’re paying for. Where cheaper models make do with four or five-ink print engines, the TS9050 uses six, which aims to combine great print quality on plain paper with exceptional photo printing. As with several PIXMA models, black pigment ink is used for bold text printing, while dye-based black, cyan, magenta and yellow inks handle graphics and photo prints. The TS9050’s sixth cartridge is grey, and this is used for finer shade control in photos and neutral black and white prints.

It’s got a huge print resolution – Canon claims that nothing else beats the 9,600 x 2,400 dots per inch (dpi) – and the scan resolution is equally impressive: few MFPs can match 2,400 x 4,800dpi. To top it off, the TS9050 has two paper inputs: a slim 100-sheet cassette in the base and a fiddly 20-sheet photo tray at the back. Its party trick is a motorised paper output tray which slides out when you start printing, and retracts when you turn the power off.

Canon Pixma TS9050: Printing and scanning performance

In testing it was soon clear that the TS9050 isn’t outrageously quick: managing just 13.4 pages per minute (ppm) printing text and 3.8ppm on colour graphics, it could barely outpace the far cheaper PIXMA TS5050. At the highest possible quality, each 6×4″ photo print took 1 min 45 secs.

Timed over a wired network connection, scans were swift, with previews taking six seconds and even a 600dpi photo scan completing in 19 seconds. However we noticed that, unless it had literally just been used, the scanner needed a few seconds to warm up, making it slightly slower in practice. Mono photocopies completed in 13 seconds, and colour copies in 25 seconds.

High specifications don’t count for much unless they translate to great results, and in the TS9050 they generally do. Plain paper prints were good, with bold black text and strong colour graphics, while photos were exceptional. Not all users will appreciate its slightly warm colour bias, but you can’t fail but be impressed by the immense sharpness and detail on offer.

Scans were similarly impressive, combining crisp focus and great dynamic range to extract an unrivalled level of detail from originals. There were a couple of misfires, however: photocopies were dingy, while photos printed from an SD card were rushed and disappointing.

Canon Pixma TS9050: Verdict

The TS9050 delivers the kind of prints and scans that will please enthusiasts and photographers, but it doesn’t consistently delight. When more lowly PIXMA models are so capable, yet so much cheaper, the TS9050 only makes sense if outright quality trumps any consideration of budget. If it doesn’t, the better deals lie further down Canon’s range.

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