Printer Review: Canon Pixma TS6260 Printer

Designed for home use, the Canon Pixma TS6260 is a printer/scanner/copier with some interesting features.

For example, 35 patterns are built into the TS6260 with wrapping paper, paper crafts and scrapbooking in mind, and sheets bearing these patterns can be printed directly from the colour touch screen control panel with no need for a computer or mobile device.

Design and Features

The conventional cassette takes up to 100 sheets of A4, A5, B5 or letter sized paper, while the rear tray accommodates a wide range of sizes for photo papers (including restickable and magnetic types), T-shirt transfer paper, cardstock or envelopes. It even allows the use of square media (eg, 10x10cm) and business cards (9.1x5.5cm).

Borderless printing is supported on various (but not all types) of media, including normal A4 paper and common photo paper sizes such as 10x15cm.

According to Canon, a borderless 10x15cm photo can be printed in just 21 seconds. For regular documents, the nominal speed is 15ppm in mono and 10ppm in colour.

Automatic two-sided printing – a good way of saving paper – is available for plain papers from the cassette. This can be used when printing or copying.

Canon Pixma Ink Cartridges

The TS6260 uses Canon's Pixma five-ink system. The usual four colours (cyan, yellow, magenta and black) are augmented with a separate pigment black cartridge for printing monochrome documents.You can buy Canon PGI-680 PGI-680XL PGI-680XXL CLI-681 CLI-681XL CLI-681XXL Ink Cartridges online at Ink Depot’s website.  

Ink Depot sells genuine Canon ink cartridges for the Pixma TS6260 at discounted prices, and you collect one Loyalty Point (redeemable against subsequent purchases) for every dollar you spend on them.

The XXL cartridges give the best value, as they offer approximately three times the yield for twice the price of the standard cartridges.

Device connectivity

The Pixma TS6260 is primarily a wireless device with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, but with no provision for adding it to an Ethernet network. It can be plugged directly into a computer's USB port.

It works with mobile devices via Pixma Cloud Print, AirPrint, Mopria and Google Cloud Print. If required, devices can connect directly to the Pixma TS6260 without having to go through a wireless router. Cableless setup mode is available at the touch of a button. This model can even print images from suitably equipped digital cameras thanks to wireless PictBridge support, but you're out of luck if you have an older camera that only supports PictBridge over USB.

Pixma Cloud Print also allows the TS6260 to print images directly from a range of services including Dropbox, Facebook and Twitter.

All-in-one Home Printer with Scanner and Copier

The flatbed scanner has an optical resolution of 1200x2400dpi. Scanning a 15x10cm photo at 1200dpi reportedly takes around 100sec, which is on the slow side. However, a single A4 page can be copied in black and white in as little as 12 seconds.

A very useful feature of the scanner is that it reminds you to remove the original document after scanning or copying.

On the other hand, there is no automatic document feeder so you will need to individually place each sheet on the scanner glass, which turns copying a multi-page document into a real chore. There again, how often do you need to copy more than a couple of pages at a time unless it's tax time?

Canon very wisely chose to omit fax capabilities from this model. There are plenty of all-in-ones on the market, and only a minority of people need to send and receive faxes from home these days - not it ever was a feature most of us required.

The price of the Pixma TS6260 is $144 according to Canon, but the street price is lower. For example, Ink Depot sells the TS6260 for $125.59.

WHAT THE REVIEWERS SAY

Pros

"Compact, smart design" Expert Reviews (NB: the TS6250 is the European version of the TS6260)

"very high-quality text, graphics and photo printing" Tech Advisor

"packed with useful features" Tech Advisor

"Print quality is ... excellent, thanks to the pigmented ink, which produces crisp, smooth text characters" Tech Advisor

"very bold, bright colours and strong contrast." Tech Advisor

"Scans preserved the full range of detail in light and dark areas, and were sharply focused with accurate colours." Expert Reviews

Cons

"the five ink cartridges that the printer uses do push the running costs up a bit." Tech Advisor

"Not especially fast" Expert Reviews

"a slight scraping noise as the heads move over the page." Expert Reviews