Canon Pixma MP610 review

And so Canon’s dominance continues. Between them the MP610 and its predecessor, the MP600, have occupied our all-in-one A List slot for a mammoth 18 months now, and that trend isn’t about to stop after the MP610’s performance in this Labs.

For a start it takes individual ink tanks, and the cartridges are ludicrously cheap, with each colour quoted to give you at least 665 colour A4 sheets. In our photo rundown test it topped the class with 224 photos before the yellow and magenta needed replacing, while the cyan had some left and neither black showed any real dent at all.

Once you’ve gone into the driver and disabled the dry-time pause on each print, those photos come out at a phenomenal rate. It took just 47 seconds for a top-quality 6 x 4in photo and 1min 39secs for our A4 photomontage; normal mono text was churned out at 8.8ppm, behind only the Dell V305w; and a colour document speed of 4.5ppm was some way clear at the front. There’s also a built-in duplex unit.

Top quality goes hand in hand with that speed, too. A clean sweep of maximum scores in our print quality text is thanks principally to the MP610’s pair of black cartridges – the pigment-based text was crisp and thick, without spidering, while the darker areas of our photos were near flawless thanks to the separate dye-based black.

The scanner isn’t quite up there with the quality of the print engine, but it remains better than most. Photo scans came out a little too light for our liking, with grass turning a little yellow, and text was less solid than we’d like. It’s fast, though, scanning a full page at 150ppi in just seven seconds, and getting through a 6 x 4in photo at 600ppi in a stunning 12 seconds.

The flip-up control panel is a nice touch – when shut the MP610 is totally flat so you could feasibly stack things on top of it – and the 2.4in LCD is intuitively controlled by a superb scroll wheel. It can print to CDs and DVDs too, and comes with ScanSoft OCR software, making it by far the best all-round device for the home user. A worthy winner – yet again.