Canon Pixma MG4150 review

The Pixma MG4150 is one of Canon’s cheaper photo printers but it has a few features we wouldn’t expect at this price. Both USB and wireless connections are provided, and owners of Android and iOS handhelds can print wirelessly using Canon’s printing apps.

The shiny black case has a well-organised control panel with a hinged, 60mm screen, showing the same menus and icons as the company’s more expensive printers. An intuitive click-wheel is used for scrolling through menus.

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Canon rates the Pixma MG4150 at 9.9ppm (pages per minute) for black print and 5.7ppm for colour. We saw a maximum speed of 8.1ppm for black text, but colour was much slower. While you might get something like 5.7ppm printing a single page, the MG4150 pauses for around 15 seconds between pages to allow for ink drying.

This slows overall speeds in our tests to around 1.8ppm. Even duplex print is faster, at around 2.1 sides per minute. Photo prints and black text on plain paper are among the best you’ll see from an inkjet all-in-one but duplex (double-sided) text printing, which oddly uses mixed colour inks instead of the black ink, looks muddy rather than black. Colour copies are blotchy, partly due to the mediocre quality of the scanner.

The twin cartridges, in their high-yield form, give page costs of 3.1p for ISO black and 6.7p for ISO colour – low enough to be very competitive. However, while the twin-cartridge design means that the machine is quick and easy to maintain, the single-colour cartridge isn’t as economical as separate colour cartridges that have to be replaced only when each colour runs out.