IT Pro Verdict
The design isn't perfect, but a cheap cost and competitive running speeds coupled with good speeds and sharp results make this an excellent printer for home or small office use.
Pros
- +
Great value; Excellent quality; Respectable speech;
Cons
- -
Cartridge loading can be awkward; Clunky control system;
Canon's PIXMA MG5750 is the latest in a long line of inkjet multifunction peripherals (MFPs) designed for the home. It's a squat, smart looking device, made from high quality black plastics. It's quite well specified: it can print, scan and copy, print automatically on both sides of a sheet of paper (duplex printing), and you can connect and share it on a wireless network. There's no fax modem, however. As you might expect, there's support for printing from or scanning to cloud services including Google Drive, but signing the printer up is far more involved than it is for products from rival manufacturers such as HP.
As a mid-range device, this PIXMA gets Canon's unusual five-ink print engine, which combines dye-based black, cyan, magenta and yellow inks with a bigger, pigment black tank for better text printing. While that's a good thing, we're disappointed that the MG5750 is lumbered with a clunky control system. Rather than touch input, its menus are navigated with a four-way rocker switch paired with three dedicated buttons below the screen - we've long criticised this setup, which can be inconsistent and confusing.
The MG5750 inherits another feature we've criticised before. Its ink cartridges are reached by raising up the cantilevered control panel, but the access is a bit restricted at the rear of each slot. Also, although the slots are clearly marked, it is physically possible to insert the dye-based cartridges in the wrong slot - we're not sure why there's no keying to prevent this. The printer's paper trays have an unusual layout where printed pages spill onto a stop that pivots out of the input tray - it looks basic, but the neat design does keep everything tidy.
Fortunately, these fairly minor grumbles couldn't spoil another great mid-range home MFP. While it isn't exactly fast, it delivered standard quality text at 11.5 pages per minute (ppm), and produced our complex colour graphics test at 3.6ppm, which is fine at this price. The scanner was quick enough at low resolutions, with a 300 dots per inch (dpi) A4 scan needing just 19 seconds, but even using a USB connection, we needed 103 seconds to capture a postcard-sized photo at 1,200dpi. Making a black photocopy of an A4 page took just 13 seconds, but in colour this rose to 30 seconds.
Undoubtedly, this MFP's best feature is the all-round high quality of its results. Text and graphics printed on plain paper were bold and crisp, while its photo prints were as good as you'll get from a mid-range inkjet - free of grain, and impressively sharp. Photocopies were faithful to the original, while scans were also sharp, with accurate colours and a high dynamic range.
Stick to Canon's XL ink cartridges and this MFP will print each A4 page of mixed text and graphics for about 6.3p, which is competitive. While we've a couple of minor reservations about its design, the MG5750 is affordable to buy and run, has decent speeds and delivers great quality results. It's a great all-rounder for a home office, and wins our Editor's Choice award.
Verdict
The design isn't perfect, but a cheap cost and competitive running speeds coupled with good speeds and sharp results make this an excellent printer for home or small office use.
