Canon Pixma MG6150

Like most other printer makers, Canon now uses touch-sensitive controls on its more expensive models.

Rather than being on the front panel, though, the controls of the MG6150 are built into the lid of the scanner section. This has two advantages: the device as a whole can be made a bit smaller, and the controls themselves can be bigger.

The touch buttons light up when the functions to which they refer are available and they were sensitive enough to respond to even a light touch. The colour screen folds up from the same lid.

The scanner is a single-sheet device (there's no automatic document feeder), but it can scan books as well as loose pages. There are two ways to feed paper in for the printer: a 150-sheet tray slides in from the front and was a little awkward to pull out, and another rear tray has the same capacity, but is usually going to be used for photo paper.

Behind a curved door on the front panel are sockets for major memory cards and at the back are sockets for connecting to a computer. It can connect using a standard USB cable (not supplied) to one PC or Mac, or using a wired or wireless network.

Black text prints were quite quick: we recorded a maximum speed of 9.6 pages per minute (ppm). Pages of colour graphics were slower at 5.7ppm, though it was still a respectable speed.

The speed dropped when printing double-sided (duplex, as it's known). One of the six ink tanks is a special ‘dye' ink which dries faster and is used for double-sided text prints, but using this made the speed to drop to 2.9ppm.

Most Canon printers we've seen recently have offered good print quality and the MG6150 is no exception: quality was excellent with clean black text and vivid colours. There was little of the visible ‘dithering' or dot patterns from which lesser printers can suffer. It also produced superb colour and black-and-white photos, which also use the ‘dye' ink described above.

With six inks to buy, running costs are a little higher than normal, but costs are competitive: a standard black page should only cost around 2.8p, with a colour one coming in at 9.3p.

At those prices and with the quality of the prints, the Pixma MG6150 is a superb-value printer-scanner.