My poor old Canon Pixma ip3000 printer, it’s a couple of years older than my daughter (who is 5) and has been through a lot. Sadly, it is well past its best, the print-head needs replacing because it prints in stripes, and it’s not reliably connecting to my computer any more. I’m upset to part with it, mainly because it takes four cartridges which can be purchased for as little as 65p and I still have a stash of them. In its prime, it was fantastic – photos quality images at a very low cost, as well as CD/DVD printing and a duplex unit built in. Time to go, though, and it’s because of my happy experience with the ip3000 that I have replaced it with another Canon Pixma, the MG6250. Now, strictly speaking this isn’t just a printer. It’s a multi-functional device, which basically means it’s a printer AND a scanner. My old scanner, also a Canon, isn’t longer compatible with Windows 7 and I had to resort to hacked drivers to get it even sort of working. This new printer will replace that device too.

Now, I’m a regular reader of PC Pro magazine, and the Canon range of printers has been topping their A-list for years – each successive model knocking the previous Canon model off the list. This applies for both the inkjet printer and multi-function categories, so I knew that when the MG6250 came out it would also do well (and indeed, in the January 2012 edition they reviewed it fully). My first impression of the device as I took it out of the box was “wow, this is big”. Thinking about it sensibly though, of course it’ll be bigger than the old one – it has a scanner built in to it too. It is taller than my old printer, very slightly wider (which means it only just fits on the table), and deeper too. Now, deeper isn’t a problem at all really because it means that the paper tray, right at the bottom, runs the full depth of the printer instead of sticking out of the front by 4 inches like on the ip3000. Although I push the printer right up against the wall behind it, I will have to pull it forward to use the manual paper feeder because this requires extra space once extended.

You may have noticed the fold-up colour screen on the top of the printer, well this is a necessity because this printer, although it can just connect directly to your PC via USB, is actually designed to connect to your home network instead. The printer supports standard 802.11bg wireless and also has what I consider to be even more important, a standard Ethernet port for hard-wiring it to your network. If you go down the network cable route, installation is very simple – plug in the cable! The first time you power it on, it runs through a self-setup procedure. It asks you to install the SIX ink cartridges one by one, with simple illustrated instructions shown on the screen. The cartridges light up with a red LED when installed correctly which is a helpful and space-age touch. Then, it does some unknown configuration inside itself for about 5 minutes, after which is politely tells you it is ready to go.

Everything is controlled from the touch panel next to the LCD screen. The display itself is not touch-screen, but instead the surface of the top of the printer contains touchable buttons which light up when enabled. It takes a bit of getting used to as they are very sensitive, but it is actually preferable to getting sticky fingers over the display. If you wish to use the wired network connection, visit settings and choose the LAN options – choosing the wired LAN option instantly enables your printer to work on the wired network. If you wish to use it on a wireless network, visit the LAN options and configure the wireless network that way. The printer supports various easy configurations, but I tested it with a standard WPA2 802.11g network and it was very easy to do. My one criticism it the input method for typing in data. The display shows either all lower-case, all upper-case, or characters and numbers. If your SSID or WPA key includes a mixture of lower-case, upper-case and symbols then you’ll be switching between the keypads frustratingly often. Fortunately you don’t need to do this often though! Now, if you are running Windows 7, all you need to do to install the printer is open Windows Explorer and take a look under ‘Network’ on the left-hand side. You should see a section labelled Multifunction Devices under which is a device. Simply double-clicking on this device automatically installed both the printer and scanner driver. Job done. In operation, I didn’t notice any difference between using it wired or wireless, I just prefer the wired option to keep my airwaves free for laptops, and as I have plenty of spare wired network capacity within easy reach of the printer there was very little point in using wireless.

If you are a bit more technically inclined, you’ll find the printer has its own configuration web page on which you can change the display name of the printer amongst other things. Right, now on to the good bits: how does the printer perform in operation?

The printer uses six ink cartridges: the standard cyan, magenta and yellow; a pigmented black for text documents; a standard black for photographs; and a grey for improved grayscale printing. I think the grey ink may be a gimmick, but I’m no expert! Filling it up with original ink costs around £50, however cheapo ink will cost about £20 so I’ll let you know about that in a future post. Sending a standard text document works the same as with any other printer – just print it.

 The front panel will fold down on its own, and providing there’s paper in the tray your print will appear. If you send a larger text document you can choose to print multiple pages per sheet, and also print on both side. The printer will automatically duplex for you so there’s no re-feeding the paper just to print on the other side.

As for photo printing, the printer was supplied with a few sheets of 4×6 glossy photo cards as a sampler. If you feed these in the manual feeder at the top, the printer auto-detects the paper size. Using Canon’s supplied Easy-PhotoPrint EX software, you can very quickly choose a photo to print, select the type of paper to print it to, and adjust it if necessary. It takes a couple of minutes to send the large amount of data across the network, but once it reaches the printer it spits it out in no time at all. Quality is very good and as good if not better than that produced by the machines in supermarkets. The printer includes a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray printing tray and the same software will talk you through that process too.

Okay, so on to the scanner… You can scan from the PC using Window’s built in “Windows Fax and Scan” software, but truth be told I found the easiest way to scan was to stick a memory card in to one of the printer’s card slots and use the printer’s control panel to scan.

The interface for performing a scan is excellent – you choose the scan option from the first menu, choose a scan type (document, photo, etc), then you choose scanning options such as media size (A4, 6×4, automatic, etc) or resolution. Then you choose where to save it which can include PCs (if directly connected) or a USB or memory card.

Once scanned, you can access your images over the network because the printer shares your memory cards as if they were network drives. Sadly it is read-only, so you’ll need to take the memory card out to erase the images eventually. I’ve left an old 2GB SD card in my printer and my only issue with doing this is that the blue LED to tell you there’s a card installed is distractingly bright.

As a demonstration I decided to print a 6×4 photo, then rescan it. I can’t of course show you the quality of the printed image, but I can show you the original file. The printout was very close to the original image as displayed on my monitor at least. I then scanned the photo in order to test the performance of the scanner. Comparing these images side by side gives you a good indication as to how the device performs as a whole.

You can see the original image on the top, and the scanned image underneath – I have re-sized both images the same and introduced the same JPG compression too. The colour loss happened in the re-scan and not in the printing and can easily be edited back to normal. Where the scanner does fall down is in focus and definition. You can clearly see a loss of clarity meaning that this scanner is perfectly good for most people, but will never match the quality of a higher end dedicated scanner. Ideal for me and my occasional use though.

This has now become the longest blog post ever, so in the interest of completeness I may as well carry on. The printer will connect to a couple of online services. One of these is Canon’s own photo gateway which is exclusive to Canon camera owners. I don’t have a Canon camera therefore couldn’t use this service! The other is Google’s Picasa. Now this is a service I could test. Connecting to my Picasa account was simple, if a little frustrating because of the aforementioned keyboard issues. Once signed up, visiting the Advanced Photo Print menu allowed to me connect to the Picasa web service. The printer displays your available photos on the screen and a simple tap of the COLOR print button spits out 6×4 print. It’s clever, but I can’t see me using it. My photos are either on Facebook, or local on my server.

I’d better summarise this then because my fingers are starting to hurt. Overall this is an excellent printer. It has many features and for the price is one of the best value. As for reliability I cannot comment yet, but I’m hoping it follows the track record of its predecessors and reputation.