I never really appreciated our home printer before Covid. It was underused, collecting dust, with ink cartridges that had long since run dry. Then came March 2020, and suddenly it was an essential piece of office equipment.
If you needed a printer at the height of the Covid lockdowns, it wasn’t easy to find one. The cheap deals we were so used to were nowhere to be found. In fact, supply chain issues meant it was hard to find any on the shelves. Everyone with a forcibly homeschooled child or home office suddenly needed one and, like many things amid Covid lockdowns, the shops could barely keep up with demand.
Three years on, that panic-bought printer might be proving more trouble than it is worth. One of the reasons inkjet printers are offered so cheaply is because companies can make up the revenue on the ink. And while there are ways around that – refillable cartridges, for example – most people find themselves caught in a cycle of shelling out for new consumables on a regular basis.
A lot of that cost may be unnecessary, particularly for the colour cartridges that have several colours combined in one. When one colour of ink is depleted, you have to replace the whole cartridge, but you are actually throwing away the remaining ink. If you hate waste, stepping away from the printer and its tricolour cartridge might be a good idea.
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The new generation of printers that ditch cartridges altogether in favour of refillable ink tanks have become increasingly popular, particularly for small offices that may not be able to justify the cost of laser.
Canon’s Maxify GX6050 is one such printer. It is one of the more costly models in the Canon range, with the ability to scan and photocopy, although you have to ask yourself when you last needed those features in your work day.
Sitting in the middle of the Canon Maxify GX range, this printer is aimed more at the small office market than home users. It has four large refillable ink tanks that make it more convenient than some of the consumer-focused printers, and the average yield, according to Canon, is about 14,000 colour pages and 6,000 black. This review did not even come close to that level of printing, but the ink tanks looked impressively full even after significant use.
Setting up the printer was a simple process, even down to filling the tanks. The ink comes in bottles that you empty into the tanks in a relatively mess-free process. On the front of the printer you can see the ink level in each tank, making it easy to spot when you are running low, and you need only replace the ink that has depleted.
The printer also has an LCD display – colour, and touch-enabled – so you can keep an eye on its status and can print wirelessly by hooking into your wifi network.
You can print on an impressive amount of media. Instead of being limited to plain paper, glossy paper and heavy paper stock, you can print on restickable and magnetic photo paper, envelopes, 1200mm banners and even fabric iron-on transfers. You may not have a lot of demand for that around your office, but the option is there.
Paper weight tops out at 275g per square metre officially, which is close to the heavier cardstock you would use for printing business cards and such.
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The first prints come out in under 10 seconds, for both colour and black and white, although the latter is slightly faster. It’s not the fastest printer out there, but what is more important is the quality. The Canon GX6050 printed with good colour reproduction and detail, across a variety of media types. Although Canon says it only takes up to 275g per square metre, I pushed it a little further without incident, but it’s not something I would depend heavily on.
Scanning and copying is not something I regularly need, but the option is there if you need it on this printer. It produced some sharp scans, with a 1200x1200 dots per inch resolution – great for archiving old photos.
Good
The most important thing about a printer is how well it prints, and the GX6050 performs well on this front. It delivered clear, sharp prints in black and white, and vivid colour prints. It may not be the fastest but if you need something that will perform consistently, the GX6050 is a good bet.
Aside from the decent print quality, the Maxify GX6050 offers larger ink tanks, which is great if you do enough printing to utilise the thousands of pages you are supposed to get from them. While filling the ink tanks is easy enough, and not as messy as you might initially fear, you don’t want to have to do it too often. And ink levels are easy to keep an eye on with the ink tanks front and centre on the device.
Bad
The initial outlay is not cheap and, even taking the savings you may make on the ink in the future into account, it may be a little too pricey for some. That is especially true given that it if all you need is a printer – no scanning or copying requirements – you could save a few euro and downgrade to a cheaper model in the GX series.
It’s not the fastest either.
Everything else
Not only can you print on a variety of media, but the printer is also compatible with wifi and Ethernet, and cloud printing services used by Apple and Android. It also supports wifi direct printing.
If you really want to, you can add the printer to your Google or Amazon digital assistant so you can issue voice commands.
The verdict
Great for smaller offices, offering just enough print capacity without going overboard.
