Canon Pixma iP2850 review

All-in-one printers are perennially popular when it comes to home printing, but some users still want and need single-function printers. As they have fewer components, single function printers cost less and take up less room.

At less than £40, you’d certainly be hard pressed to find an MFP that beats the price of the single-function Canon Pixma iP2850. It’s a small, white, slightly flimsy printer that looks a little old-fashioned but occupies gratifyingly little desk space with its trays folded up. There’s no lip on the output tray, but we were pleased to find that printed pages didn’t drop off the end or slip out of order.

We’re used to budget printers being less capable than their more expensive counterparts, but the iP2850 is missing several features that we take for granted from inkjets. The most notable of these is its lack of borderless photo printing at any size. Admittedly, we wouldn’t recommend this printer’s dual-cartridge, four-colour ink system for photos at the best of times, but it would have been nice to have the option. It’s also worth noting that the printer’s photo paper support only includes 6x4in papers; you can’t select photo paper as an option if you’ve also opted for an A4 paper size.

The iP2850 has a pigment-based black ink cartridge and a tri-colour cartridge for dye-based inks. Tri-colour cartridges often appear in cheaper printers and MFPs, but note that if any you’ll have to replace the whole cartridge if one colour runs out. XL cartridges are available, which should give you 400 black and 300 colour pages. We’ve calculated our average mixed-colour page print cost of 11.6p and steep mono cost of 3.7p based on the XL cartridges.

Although combined-colour cartridge systems are often regarded as lower quality than their individual ink counterparts, we were pleased with the printer’s clean, professional looking monochrome text and colour document prints. We had to stare very closely at our standard quality monochrome text print to see any flaws in its lettering at all, while a draft quality text print had thinner lettering but only slight jagged edges that were visible on looped letters. Draft mode saves ink, but doesn’t actually print any faster. Our standard quality text print was actually a couple of seconds faster, producing a print speed of 7.1ppm versus a draft speed of 7ppm. Our colour prints of heavily illustrated articles, charts and web pages look great, with sharp lines, smooth shading and accurate colour. Small 8pt serif and sans serif fonts were also clearly legible.

The printer can’t produce true 6x4in photos, instead producing images that are just shy of 3x5in on our 6x4in photo paper. This is irritating, but we were surprised to find that the quality of the photo prints, small though they are, is actually surprisingly good. Dark colours are among the best we’ve seen from a three-ink dye-based system, there aren’t any unwanted colour tints, and detail is sharp.

Some areas of subtle shading are less finely gradated than we’d like, and our low-contrast grey and brown test image was a bit dull, but the iP2850 is good if you need to print in a hurry and don’t mind getting handy with a pair of scissors.

The iP2850 is one of the most basic printers around. There’s no screen, network connection, or cloud printing. Even aligning the print heads calls upon you to print out three pages and pick the most solid colours from multiple options. It’s rare to see a printer this simple, but if you only need a cheap-to-buy, basic printer you could be on to a winner with the Canon iP2850. Unfortunately, the iP2850 is expensive to run, which makes its cheap £36 purchase price less good value that it might first appear. Many users will get more out of an MFP such as the Epson Expression Home XP-212, despite its sluggish print speeds and higher price.