Canon Pixma iP4850 review

Canon's Pixma range of single- and multi-function inkjets frequently dominates our Editor's Choice lists thanks to a well-balanced combination of speed and quality. The iP4850 provides few surprises; like the iP4700 that it replaces, this single-function printer has a great range of features that make it a capable printer of photos, plain paper documents and more. These include an automatic duplexer for two-sided printing, a CD printing tray, two paper trays for a total capacity of up to 300 sheets and a Pictbridge USB port for printing directly from a digital camera.

The iP4850 takes five different ink cartridges, which have been specially developed for the new range of Pixma printers. The print head is a separate unit that can be replaced if necessary. The inks include a pigment black, used only for plain paper printing; a dye-based black, used only for photo printing, and the usual dye-based cyan, magenta and yellow inks, which are used for both photos and plain paper documents.

All the ink cartridges are currently priced at a little under £12 online, but these are pre-release prices. This means that the print costs of 6.9p per colour pages and 3.5p per mono page (producing a mixed-colour page cost of 10.4p) should fall in the near future. We hope this will be the case, as pigmented black pages currently cost more than we'd expect. A 6x4in photo will cost around 52p on Canon Photo Paper Pro II and 32p on Canon Photo Paper Plus.

The most obvious improvement Canon has made over previous Pixma models is in terms of print speeds, with a draft speed of 13.8ppm and a mono text sped of 9.7ppm. Full-quality 6x4in photos take just under a minute to print. A 10-sided draft colour duplex print took just under four minutes. The speed improvements to draft printing seem to have resulted in a slight drop in quality; mono text looks a little grey and slightly jagged, but there are no problems with its legibility. Draft colour, however, looks very washed out and small fonts are jagged and speckled.

Full quality and photo printing don't suffer, though. The pigmented black ink produces dark, solid-looking lettering, while our illustrated business documents were richly coloured. Photos are also vividly coloured, with precise blacks and whites; default settings provide slight oversaturation, but the effect is both pleasing and easy to change if you don't like it. Our only complaint was with some visible dithering on areas of subtle shading.

The final upgrade to this new printer comes in the form of extra features. These include ink cartridge chips that reward you with access to the professional templates and images on Canon's Creative Park Premium service every time you buy an original Canon ink cartridge. Another heavily promoted feature is the ability to print stills from HD video captured by a Canon EOS or PowerShot camera. However, this currently only applies to HD video produced by these two ranges of Canon stills cameras and not third-party video or even Canon's HD camcorders.

Whether or not you should buy the iP4850 is largely dependent on whether its ink prices go down upon release. If they do, then this will be a worthy successor to the Pixma range. If not, you may be better off buying last year's Pixma iP4700, which uses the previous version of the ink system, so costs less to run – it's a bit slower though. If print costs fall, we'll upgrade the iP4850's rating at a later date.