Canon PIXMA MG6350 review

At first glance Canon’s PIXMA MG6350 looks identical to the cheaper Canon PIXMA MG5450, and in fact they have a great deal in common: both have two paper input trays and support duplex (double-sided) printing, and they share the same high print (9,600×2,400dpi) and scan (2,400×4,800dpi) resolutions. But while both printers have wireless networking, only the MG6350 also has a wired Ethernet port – which could help speed up high resolution scans over the network.

The MG6350 has a sophisticated touchscreen interface, which uses smartphone-like touch and swipe gestures to navigate the MFP’s various functions. The touchscreen is surrounded by a dark panel on which various other touch-sensitive buttons light up only when they’re relevant; while it may sound like a gimmick, in use it helps keep things simple.

This printer takes six ink cartridges, comprising a black pigment ink for text, and black, grey, cyan magenta and yellow cartridges for high quality colour prints. They’re accessed via a clever, lift-up control panel, but you can’t easily see the rear of the ink carrier, so you have to insert cartridges partly by feel. You also can’t tilt the screen or the controls, which could be frustrating if you’re using the printer on a shelf near eye level.

Start a print job and the printer’s front panel pops open, with a support swinging out to form an output tray. You need to extend the support manually to cope with A4 paper, but it’s only about an inch wide so large quantities of paper can get untidy, and the support must be retracted before you can re-close the front panel. Two shallow paper trays slung under the printer hold 125 sheets of plain paper and up to 20 sheets of photo media.

High specifications don’t always translate into great results, but they do in the case of the MG6350. It’s a swift text printer, delivering our 25-page text test at almost 13ppm, but slightly less impressive when it comes to colour graphics, reaching only 2.6ppm in our test. Although it wasn’t a fast scanner when connected over our congested wireless network, over USB it was very quick at resolutions up to and including 600dpi. Images were in sharp focus and exhibited a wide dynamic range, with good colour accuracy.

Select the Main tab of the print driver to make basic changes to print speed and quality

To the naked eye, the printer’s black text looked as good as the output from a laser device, while colour prints on plain paper were equally sharp and reasonably bold. Colour and greyscale photocopies were both impressively good, and at 21 and 12 seconds respectively they completed very quickly. While this isn’t the fastest photo printer we’ve encountered, the results from the six-ink system were superb, particularly when it came to reproducing shade detail. Our black and white test print was excellent with a very neutral colour – so much so that we suspect only grey and black inks were used to create it.

With good looks, performance and controls, this is a great MFP. It’s not especially cheap to buy or run, but it’s worth it for those who want the best quality results. It wins our Best Buy award.