Canon Pixma MG6450 review

It’s not all bad, fortunately. Text printing was quite quick, reaching 13.3 pages per minute, and colour printing speeds were also competitive, with the printer managing 3.7ppm when it came to printing our challenging and heavily illustrated business documents. Photo printing was also swift, delivering a photo every two minutes at the highest possible quality.

Like other PIXMAs we’ve tested recently, scans became quite slow over Wi-Fi at higher quality settings: a 1,200dpi photo scan took more than four minutes on our wireless network. When we switched to a USB connection that 6x4in 600dpi scan speed dropped to around half a minute, with 300dpi document scans coming in at about 20 seconds.

Scans and prints were uniformly excellent, with accurate colours, sharp detailing and convincingly reproduced contrast and shading even in the lightest and darkest regions. Our only minor criticism was that the colour accuracy wasn’t perfect in photocopies; although this is a common problem. Mono text was pin-sharp across the range of font sizes we test, while photos are among the best you’ll find from a home inkjet, with the extra photographic black cartridge really coming into its own.

The MG6450 has one last strength: it accepts high-capacity versions of all five ink tanks, which include both dye-based black for photo printing and pigmented black for sharp mono text on standard paper. The support for high-capacity cartridges means that mono running costs are a reasonable 2.3p per page, and colour costs are low at 5.1p, for a mixed-colour total of 7.4p. It’s a great MFP, although its comparatively high price and basic paper input and output trays mean that most users will do better with the cheaper Canon Pixma MG5550, which was only slightly slower in our tests.