Canon PIXMA IX6850

Is the Canon PIXMA IX6850 worth buying?

Yes, the Canon PIXMA IX6850 is worth buying at £178.98 for a desk that prints A3+ posters, spreadsheets and photos and only occasionally copies a sheet. It puts borderless wide-format output on the desk for £6.92 less than the Brother MFC-J5340DW, and 1,521 owners, the largest group behind any A3 machine in this group, rate it 4.2.

Skip it if A3 printing is a daily production job rather than a regular task. A 200-page A3 run takes about 14 minutes at 14.5 ppm, there is no automatic double-sided printing to halve the paper handling, and the single tray has to be reloaded whenever you switch between plain A4 and heavyweight photo stock. An office that prints wide format every day should spend the extra money on a faster all-in-one.

How fast is the Canon PIXMA IX6850?

The figure that shapes daily use is 14.5 ipm in mono and 10.4 ipm in colour, so plain A4 text lands at roughly one sheet every four seconds while colour runs about 40 percent slower. Divide the £178.98 price by 14.5 ppm and every page per minute of speed costs £12.34. A 100-page A3 document therefore takes around seven minutes of machine time.

Print quality is where the money shows. The FINE print head runs at 9600 x 2400 dpi, a dedicated pigment black keeps text sharp on plain paper, and five separate inks (PGBK, BK, cyan, magenta, yellow) mean only the colour that empties gets replaced. Borderless printing works all the way up to A3+, a 10 x 15 cm borderless photo comes out in about 36 seconds, XL cartridges cut the cost per page by up to 30 percent, and an XXL pigment black cartridge reaches 1,000 monochrome pages.

What does the Canon PIXMA IX6850 come with and how much room does it need?

The Canon PIXMA IX6850 arrives ready to connect over Wi-Fi, Ethernet or a single USB 2.0 port, and Canon's PIXMA Printing Solutions app plus Apple AirPrint handle jobs sent from phones and tablets. It measures 58.4 cm wide, 31 cm deep and 15.9 cm tall, so it wants the footprint of a compact microwave rather than a shelf corner. At 8.1 kg it is light enough for one person to lift into place.

One 250-sheet input tray feeds the machine and a 150-sheet output tray catches the pages, with everything from A4 up to A3+ accepted. Networking covers several PCs at once, so a household or small office can share the printer without cable swapping, and Android devices are supported through the app. Setup is a matter of lifting it out of the box, loading the tray and joining the network.

Where does the Canon PIXMA IX6850 fall short?

There is no automatic double-sided printing anywhere on this machine, so a two-sided 100-page document means feeding 200 sheets by hand. On a printer aimed at posters and spreadsheets that is the single biggest irritation, because the work it does best is also the work that fills a paper tray fastest. One 250-sheet tray makes it worse: A4 and heavyweight A3+ stock cannot be loaded at the same time.

Copying stops at 100 copies per run, so anything larger has to be restarted, and there is no document feeder for multipage scanning. Speed is the other ceiling at 14.5 ipm mono and 10.4 ipm colour, less than half the 28 to 32 ppm that the Brother and Epson document machines in this field deliver. Nothing here faxes, so an office with a fax line needs another device.

Canon PIXMA IX6850 vs Brother MFC-J5340DW and Epson WorkForce WF-7310DTW

The Brother MFC-J5340DW costs £185.90, which is £6.92 more, and prints A3 at 28 ppm, working out at £6.64 per page per minute against £12.34 for the Canon PIXMA IX6850. It adds a 6.8 cm colour touchscreen, 550 pages of ink in the box and an A4 scanner that copies and faxes. Choose the Brother when A3 documents arrive in weekly batches and speed matters more than photo quality.

The Epson WorkForce WF-7310DTW is the cheaper route at £154.19, £24.79 less than the Canon, and it prints at 32 ppm with automatic double-sided printing up to A3 across two paper trays. It has no scanner at all, which leaves the Canon with a small edge for anyone who occasionally copies a page. Buy the Epson for raw document volume, the Brother for all-in-one office work, and the Canon when A3+ photo and poster output comes first.