Canon PIXMA TS9550a

Is the Canon PIXMA TS9550a worth buying?

The Canon PIXMA TS9550a is worth buying at £176.99 if you need A3 scanning as well as A3 printing on a home desk, because it is the cheapest machine on this page that does both. It prints at 15 ppm mono and 10 ppm colour, scans up to A3 through a 20-sheet automatic document feeder, and carries a 10.8 cm touchscreen on the front. Anyone who only ever prints A3 can spend less elsewhere; anyone who has to digitise A3 paperwork will use this every week.

The case for it is floor space. You get A3 output from a body 46.8 cm wide, 36.6 cm deep and 19.3 cm high, which is roughly the footprint of a compact A4 all-in-one, and 9.7 kg means one person can move it without help. It also prints borderless, runs automatic double-sided printing on A4, and builds a booklet straight from the touchscreen.

What does 15 ppm cost you per page?

Fifteen pages per minute works out at £11.80 for every page per minute of speed, because £176.99 divided by 15 is 11.80. That places it in the slower half of the A3 field: the Brother MFC-J5340DW at £185.90 prints 28 ppm and lands at £6.64 by the same sum. A 200-sheet A3 run takes about 13 minutes here and about 7 minutes on the Brother.

Detail is where it holds its own. Print resolution reaches 4800 x 1200 dpi, and five individual inks do the work: a pigment black cartridge for document text plus separate black, cyan, magenta and yellow for colour and photos. Canon rates an album print for up to 100 years, and the machine draws 14 W, low enough to leave switched on between jobs.

What comes in the box with the Canon PIXMA TS9550a?

The box holds the printer, a set of set-up ink tanks, the power cord, a set-up CD-ROM and the manuals, so the first pages come out without a separate shopping trip. Replacements are PGI-580PGBK pigment black and CLI-581 in black, cyan, magenta and yellow, bought one colour at a time as each runs dry.

A single tray holds the paper, and stock can be fed from two directions, so plain A4 can stay loaded while A3 goes in through the other path. The 20-sheet document feeder takes a multipage scan in one pass, up to 99 copies can be set in one go, and the 19.3 cm height means it wants a shelf with clearance above it.

Where does the Canon PIXMA TS9550a fall short?

Speed is the first thing an owner feels. At 15 ppm mono and 10 ppm colour, mixed A3 work takes roughly double the time of a 28 ppm machine, and a colour sheet needs about six seconds on its own. A handful of pages a day makes that invisible; a weekly 200-sheet run turns it into a coffee break.

The 20-sheet feeder is the second limit. A 60-page report needs three reloads, and the feeder is the only route into the scanner, so a bound page or a fragile original is a problem. One paper tray also means A3 and A4 stock compete for the same slot on a day when you need both.

How does it compare with the Brother MFC-J5340DW and the Epson WorkForce WF-7840?

The Brother MFC-J5340DW costs £8.91 more at £185.90 and prints at 28 ppm, which comes to £6.64 per page per minute against £11.80 here. Its scanning and copying stop at A4, so the Canon remains the better buy when A3 originals need digitising, and the Brother wins when the work is A3 printing at volume.

The Epson WorkForce WF-7840 costs £54.91 more at £231.90 and goes further, with A3+ print, scan, copy and fax at 32 ppm, or £7.25 per page per minute, plus twin trays and a larger feeder. Choose the Epson for an office that scans A3 all day, and the Canon for a home desk that needs A3 scanning now and then in a 9.7 kg package.