Canon Pixma MG5550 review

best buy

1 / 2

Canon’s all-in-one printers are often among our favourites, although the company tends to do best at the £100+ mark. However, the Canon Pixma MG5550 is a £70 MFP with five individual ink cartridges, an automatic duplexer, cloud printing when it’s connected to a wireless network and a colour screen. This combination of features is one we’re used to seeing from much more expensive hardware, so this MFP is a tempting proposition. The all-in-one has a single paper input tray at the bottom, which works well but is unfortunately exposed to dust.

The MG5550 has two black ink cartridges: dye-based black for photo printing and a pigmented black cartridge for sharp document printing. Pigmented inks don’t bleed, leading to more precise lettering, particularly on the kind of low-grade paper often sold in supermarkets. At standard quality, the MG5550’s mono text prints are indeed sharp and dark and printed at a rather swift 11.3ppm. We don’t like the paper input and output trays as much as those of earlier models, which kept paper out of the way in an enclosed box. Large stacks of prints in the output tray looked a little shaky, but held their order.

The MG5550’s quick standard print speed means there’s little to be gained in terms of speed by printing at draft quality; draft text prints emerged at 11.5ppm. However, draft mode uses less ink and looks just as sharp, only with thinner lettering. Close examination reveals that draft lettering is a little more jagged than its full-quality equivalent, but it doesn’t show at a glance. Colour print speeds aren’t too bad either, at 3.6ppm. However, for optimal results, you’ll want to use thicker paper: a test involving 75gsm paper left large areas of dark colour looking a little uneven due to the large quantity of ink left to try on them. Apart from slight speckling, we were happy with the quality of our colour website prints and illustrated business documents, particularly in areas of finely gradated shading. Text in small point sizes was also rendered sharply.

Canon Pixma MG5550F Print Quality

An automatic duplexer not only saves on paper, which is important if you use good-quality inkjet paper, but the double-sided documents it produces often have a look of slick professionalism that a bundle of single-sided prints lacks. That’s very much the case here. The quality of our colour duplex print was among the best we’ve seen. Slightly less ink is used than in simplex printing, but this didn’t affect the vivid reproduction of our illustrated business graphics. Even on thin paper, we didn’t see any bleed-through but the opposite side of each page was visible. Duplex printing is also slow, as the MFP has to pause while each side dries. Ten colour pages on five sheets of paper printed in five minutes and 25 seconds, which works out at a rate of 1.8ppm. If you’ve got a large document to print, you’ll definitely want to go away and make a cup of tea while you’re waiting.

Canon’s individual-ink printers excel when it comes to photo printing, although they can be expensive to run if you buy Canon’s top Platinum Pro photo paper; other, cheaper papers are available. We loved the glossy finish of our printers and were particularly pleased with the depth of black tones and untinted light colours. Skin tones fared well, as did our low-contrast test images. However, some slight graininess was visible in some prints, particularly those with subtly gradated shading. The quality is nonetheless good given the cost of the MFP. Photo print speeds were also reasonable, with a pair of 10x8in prints emerging in three minutes and 39 seconds and six 6x4in prints coming out in four minutes and 19 seconds.

Canon Pixma MG5550F Scanner

The MFP has a 1,200×2,400dpi CIS scanner, but it’s impossible to judge quality based on specifications alone: most modern MFPs are similarly equipped. Fortunately, the MG5550 has one of the best scanners we’ve seen on a sub-£100 all-in-one printer. Subtly different shades of colour are accurately captured, while fine details are clearly visible even at high zoom levels. Always challenging shaded areas were delicately gradated, too, and scan speeds were reasonable, if not exactly blistering: 13 seconds for a 150dpi A4 scan up to a minute and 39 seconds for a 1,200dpi 6x4in scan. We were pleased to find that even a 150dpi document scan was legible, although if you want to zoom in on text a great deal, you’re still better off with a 300dpi scan, which took 20 seconds in our tests.

Copy quality is highly dependent on the quality of your scanner, but a good scanner alone doesn’t guarantee top-notch copies. Contrast was great even in our mono copies, making illustrations clearly visible. 8pt text was sharp and legible, but dark areas on both mono and colour copies were a little grainy, with visible print head marks in places. A mono copy took 14 seconds, while a colour copy took 18.

Canon Pixma MG5550F Conclusion

The MG5550 is a well-built all-in-one printer, with excellent print and scan quality for an inkjet of this price. Its running costs are reasonably low, with a mixed-colour page costing just 7.4p and a mono page a fantastic 2.3p. Combining speed, plenty of features, good print and scan quality and a price that’s well under the £100 mark, this is an ideal home or home office MFP for practically anyone, whether you’re into photos, scanning artwork or just printing reams of double-sided documents. It earns a well-deserved Best Buy award.