But it isn’t as simple as installing a pair of cartridges and enjoying cheap prints. If you print photos on anything slightly resembling a regular basis, you’ll need the CL-51 (colour) and PG-50 (black) cartridges. A pair of these will set you back £51.89 in total, but in our continuous-use tests they printed a spectacular 369 6 x 4in prints, and the 76 per cent efficiency was the icing on the cake.
Indeed, the cost per 6 x 4in print would be even lower if it wasn’t for Canon’s rather expensive professional photo paper. £4.92 for a pack of 20 seems fairly painless, but it works out at 25p per sheet – more than half the price of the final print. This compares poorly with Epson’s fantastic 10p per sheet, and isn’t too far off Lexmark’s worst-case 30p per sheet.
Since the print heads were brand new, we didn’t experience any problems with print quality due to the nozzles in the cartridges clogging, but little thought seems to have been put into warning the user when the cartridges are running out of ink. During our continuous testing, we arrived in the morning to find the iP2200 merrily churning out sheets of blank white paper.
Disclaimer: Some pages on this site may include an affiliate link. This does not effect our editorial in any way.
