Canon Pixma TS5050 review: a smart-looking MFP with good all-round performance

As Canon's latest home colour MFP, the PIXMA TS5050 touts an attractive squat design with print, scan and copy features that can be connected and shared across any home Wi-Fi network.

Canon Pixma TS5050 review: Features

One of our favourite things about the PIXMA TS5050 is that Canon has employed its five-ink system, occupying both a pigment-based black for bold text on plain paper, and a dye black for better contrast in photos.

Another great feature is that the TS5050 has an SD card slot, which lets you print photos directly from a memory card. And you can also use Canon's Android or iOS apps to print wirelessly from a tablet or phone if needed.

In terms of operation, the PIXMA TS5050 is much easier to use than Canon's previous devices. While the combination of a colour 3in display and redesigned controls are a welcome improvement, we're delighted that the firm has decided to ditch its confusing mix of separate selection buttons and direction rocker. Instead we now have a simple cursor key with a button in the centre to confirm choices. These make navigating the menu much easier.

For paper feeding, the PIXMA TS5050 has a 100-sheet rear paper tray and front output feed. This generally works fine, but sometimes we found the feed slot cover would have to be manually closed after re-stocking with paper. Another annoyance is the lack of automatic duplex (double-sided) printing. It's something we would have expected as standard with this price tag.

Canon Pixma TS5050 review: Running costs, Performance and speed

Overall printing costs work out at about 7.4p per page for the PIXMA TS5050, which we believe to be a little on the high side, but this is because of Canon's two-black-ink setup. The dye black ink is barely used for plain paper work. Canon estimates this to last for around 4,000 pages.

Where the Canon PIXMA TS5050 really shines however is in performance. In our 25 page test, it managed to deliver black text at 12.3 pages per minute (ppm). While switching to draft saved ink, there was no other noticeable drop off in quality nor speed. Colour graphics performance was pretty rapid at 3.7ppm, reaching 4.8ppm in draft mode for only a slight loss of quality, and it took just seven minutes to print two 10x8" photos at the highest possible detail.

Print quality was uniformly very good. Text was crisp, while photos were sharp and detailed, although those looking for perfect quality prints may need to do a little tweaking in Photoshop before printing to achieve the right tones, as colours did seem to be printed a little warmer than previewed.

Overall scanning results on the PIXMA TS5050 were decent. Scanning over USB is relatively fast, especially when doing so at up to 1,200 dots per inch (dpi). A postcard photo at this depth, for instance, took about a minute and a half to complete. Scanning quality was particularly sharp with a high dynamic range that maintained both very light and very dark shade detail.

In terms of photocopying, the PIXMA TS5050 was slightly slower than we'd have liked, with a single A4 paper copy taking around 20 seconds in black and 21 seconds in full colour.

Canon Pixma TS5050 review: Verdict

The Canon PIXMA TS5050 is attractively-designed, with excellent performance and output. It's slight more expensive than some of its rivals and per-page printing costs can get a little pricey, but if you can stomach this then it's a highly capable and tempting SMB all-in-one printer.