Canon Pixma iP8750 review: Print A3+ photos for less than £200
A solid inkjet that delivers top-quality poster-sized prints and can turn its hand to documents, too
Pros
- A3+ photo printing
- Pics are nice and sharp
- Everyday prints are quite economical
Cons
- Colour reproduction is merely alright
- It’s a printer only – no scanner
- No Ethernet
Canon’s Pixma range includes some really top-notch photo printers, going all the way up to the venerable Pixma PRO-100S. If you don’t have £360 to spend on that, though, the smaller, lighter Pixma iP8750 is an attractive compromise, delivering great-looking borderless prints at sizes up to A3+, for under £200.
Canon Pixma iP8750 review: Features and Design
The Pixma iP8750 is relatively cheap for an A3+ printer, so you don’t get many bells and whistles. There’s Wi-Fi support, plus compatibility with Apple AirPrint and Google Cloud Print, but no Ethernet socket, and no duplexing. There’s also an optional disc-printing tray, which may appeal to wedding photographers or those regularly burning discs for friends and family.
Canon Pixma iP8750 review: Performance
The Pixma iP8750 has a very high resolution, printing photos at up to 9,600 x 2,400dpi, with a droplet size of only 1pl. Such numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, though: our prints looked beautifully sharp, but no more so than the output from the PRO-100, which officially has half the resolution and a droplet size of 3pl.
Colour accuracy wasn’t quite so great. The subtle shades of brown in our test landscape image were crushed into a bit of a dark mass by the iP8750; skin tones in our studio portrait didn’t look entirely natural, and the subtle gradient in our black-and-white product shot was marred by a slight purple tinge. Still, the overall quality of photo prints from the iP8750 was high, and we certainly wouldn’t be ashamed to frame the results.
The printer doesn’t hang around either: Canon quotes 36 seconds to print a borderless 10 x 15cm photo; we found a top-quality A4 photo print arrived in only 1min 36secs, while A3+ prints take around two minutes to appear. For everyday documents, the printer’s rated at 14.5ppm in monochrome and 10.4ppm in colour.
Canon Pixma iP8750 review: Running costs
The iP8750 employs a six-ink cartridge system; each cartridge can be changed individually, so you don’t need to throw out a half-full cyan canister just because you’ve run out of yellow. And cartridges are available in both regular and XL sizes, the latter costing around £15 each.
According to Canon’s own yield estimates, this means you’re looking at a cost of around 10.6p per full-colour A4 page, or around 4p per page of a mono document, so it’s a reasonably economical general-purpose photo and document printer.
Printing a 10x15cm borderless photo should cost around 20p; we calculated that a borderless A3+ photo will set you back around £1.55 (excluding paper).
Canon Pixma iP8750 review: Verdict
The Pixma iP8750 is great for anyone who fancies a dabble in large-format photo-printing. It delivers lovely crisp prints, albeit without the pristine colour accuracy of more expensive inkjets, and it isn’t wasteful when churning out documents either.
