The Pixma range from Canon has proved over the years to be quite a solid workhorse and very popular with consumers. The range is, for the most part, consists of good-quality printers that tend to remain in active service for quite some time.
This particular Pixma is something of an oddity among its cousins on the shelves, as Canon has made the decision to buck the trend for multifunction printers and has released a standard printer aimed squarely at the home and SOHO user.
The Pixma iP2850 is a USB-only connected printer that's exceptionally cheap, at just £34.99. It's an all-white design that, when considered with the i-part of the title, puts you in mind more of an Apple product than the run-of-the-mill printer.
It takes just two cartridges, black and colour, with options for an XL cartridge to squeeze out a few more pages of text. On paper, the yield of the normal cartridge is 180 pages for both the black and colour, with the XL cartridges capable of knocking out 400 pages for the black and 300 pages for the colour.
The print speed was recorded at around eight pages per minute for a page full of text, while a colour photo took roughly three pages per minute. It's therefore not the quickest printer in production, but rather than rushing through the job, the iP2850 produced one of the best-quality text print we've seen in a sub-£50 printer.
Furthermore, the colour print -printed on to glossy paper - was an exceedingly high standard and quite surprising for a printer of this price. And it was fairly fast too, for a high-quality print. We even upped the details level to its maximum of 4800 x 600 for a colour glossy test, which was then printed after around 55 seconds.
The 60-page input tray flips up and settles back on its hinge to allow easy access to load up the paper, and from there you can also gain access to the cartridge slots. Overall, the entire hinge mechanism, the output tray, which slides out from the bottom of the printer, and the raised lid for cartridge access are well designed and solid enough to take a fair amount of abuse.
Obviously, depending on the environment the printer is going to be housed in, the stark white plastic may not remain very white for long. But with some care there's no reason why the printer won't be as clean and as presentable as the day you bought it.
The main issues, though, are the lack of modern connectivity and networking and the fact that there's only a single colour cartridge. The connectivity side of things can be fixed by hooking the printer up to a router or NAS drive with a USB port and sharing capabilities (print server too), but that means you're stuck with the printer in a single location. And should you run out of magenta, then you'll need to replace the entire colour cartridge.
Cost per page with the standard black cartridge, at £10.40 from Amazon, comes to around 6p per page. The standard colour at £12.15 from Amazon is around 7p per page.