Canon Pixma MA TS7450/1 Review

The Canon Pixma TS7450 is an excellent all-in-one that offers good text and photo printing quality, for under £100.

Should I Buy The Canon Pixma TS7450?

Pros

• Prints quickly
• Excellent text and photo print quality
• Inexpensive to buy and run

Cons

• Mobile apps aren’t always intuitive
• Heavy and hard to move around
• Photos need glossy paper

Our Verdict

• The Canon Pixma TS7450 is a great value all-in-one printer offering a wide range of features and high-quality results along with affordable running costs.

Price When Reviewed

• $110

The Canon Pixma TS7450 is an inkjet all-in-one colour printer, scanner, and copier. Priced at under £100, it promises to do everything for a tidy price. 

The ability to scan and print copies of documents simultaneously, as well as copy and print two sides of the same sheet, means it can be turned to a wide variety of purposes. The Canon Pixma TS7450 can print on A4 paper as well as A5, B5, and the ANSI Letter size, on standard plain paper and glossy photo paper. 

On top of that, PixmaTS7450 printers can handle print requests over Wi-Fi from a variety of mobile apps, as well as macOS devices – it’s an AirPrint-compatible printer, so there’s no need to install any drivers. For other situations, there’s a USB port which supports PictBridge, so if you need to print directly from your laptop, or a compatible camera, you’ve got the option to go totally wired. 

With the work-from-home life still the norm for many of us now, the need for a versatile does-it-all printer has never been greater. Let’s see if the Canon Pixma TS7450 fits the bill.

Note that this is the black colour exclusive to Argos but the Pixma TS7451 is the same printer in white and can be found elsewhere.

Design & Build

The Canon PIXMA TS7450 is a multi-functional device, but considering all it can do, it’s not a massive space hog – the printer measures 206 x 403 x 364mm. As you might expect, with everything crammed into such a small space means that the Canon Pixma TS7450 is pretty heavy, weighing 8.2kg. Space-efficient it may be, easy to reposition your desk it is not. 

An Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) sits on the top – this can hold up to 35 pages of A4 at a time. Pushing this top section back reveals the scanner glass, which also accepts paper up to A4 size, reading things at a resolution of 1200 x 2400dpi. Behind this sits the rear paper feeder, which slides up and out of the printer, and can hold up to 100 sheets of plain A4 paper, or 20 sheets of photo paper.

At the base of the Canon Pixma TS750 is the main paper in-tray. This holds up to 100 sheets of plain A4, and is the paper tray you’ll be refilling the most if you’re mainly printing documents. Underneath this sits the middle section which you’ll want to pop open whenever you need to add new cartridges. 

Set-up, Apps & Wireless Printing

On the front of the Canon Pixma TS7450 sits a tiny 1.44in OLED control panel, which lets you do the usual thinks like check for ink levels, run alignment tests, and the like.

You’ll also be staring at this control panel for a while during the set-up process. Once you’ve connected the Pixma TS7450 to the mains and clipped the new cartridges in, it’ll cycle through the main set-up process, which only takes a couple of minutes. 

Once that’s done, you can then connect the Canon Pixma TS7450 to your home Wi-Fi network to get set up for wireless printing. 

There are several ways you can do this, by using the WPS push button, the ‘easy wireless connect’ option which uses your phone’s Bluetooth to establish a connection between the printer and your router to enter your home network’s password on your phone’s screen. This is by far the easiest option. 

As the OLED control panel isn’t touch-sensitive, entering network credentials manually means you have to cycle through each and every character with arrow keys when punching in your Wi-Fi password, as if you’re entering a high score on an old arcade machine. While creating a strong password is essential to keeping your home network safe, having to key in letters of different cases, numbers, special characters and so on can take... quite a long time. 

Once that’s done, whichever way you do it, you’re now ready to print wirelessly from devices like a MacBook Pro – the Pixma TS7450 is compatible with Apple AirPrint, so there’s no need for you to install and drivers. Windows users can make use of the supplied CD-ROM, or download drivers from Canon’s site in order to do the same. 

In terms of printing documents and pictures from your phone, you have a lot of firepower at your disposal with the Canon Pixma TS7450. Supported apps include the Canon Print Inkjet/Selphy app, Canon Easy-PhotoPrint Editor, and Canon Creative Park - all of which are available on iOS an Android.

You’ll mainly use the Canon Print Inkjet/Selphy apps for printing documents. There is a scanner feature, so you can take photos of documents on your phone and print them immediately, although it's rudimentary – just use your phone’s main camera. You can print photos from Print Inkjet/Selphy, but in my experience, results are mixed and you don’t have a lot of customisation options. 

For printing images, you’re far better off using the Canon Easy-PhotoPrint Editor app, which in addition to giving you greater control over photo print layouts, comes packed with useful templates and presets like passport photos, business cards, birthday and Valentine’s Day cards, and even CD labels, useful, if you’re making someone an old-school mix CD. 

The Canon Creative Park app takes this even further, allowing you to print out fun things like wall stickers, origami buildings and animals, party decorations, and other fun things, though you’ll need to set up a Canon ID for this. 

Generally speaking, these apps are all pretty simple to use, though the layouts are a bit bewildering at first, and there’s little that can be done in terms of actual photo editing. You might be better off tinkering with your snaps in a separate app first and it’s a little baffling that there isn’t just one app that does everything well. 

Finally, Mopria for Android is also supported, so if you want to just quickly print something directly from your phone’s gallery, you can do that too. 

Performance

Canon quotes an approximate print speed of 13ppm (pages per minute) for mono prints and 6.8ppm for colour images. Note that Canon is basing these figures on speeds with its own Photo Paper Plus Glossy II, and not bog standard A4 plain. 

In my tests, I recorded a rate of 11.3ppm when printing 20 pages of black text on plain paper, which took 1 minute 46 seconds. Printing out a 20-page file with a combination of text and colour images took a little longer – 2 minutes 41 seconds, or a rate of 7.45ppm. 

Printing a large colour image on a single page of A4 took just under a minute (58 seconds). 

In the review sample I was sent, Canon included a pack of its own glossy GP-501 10x15cm (4x6in) photo paper. Individual bordered and borderless photos took between 20-30 seconds to print. This is reasonably skippy, and would more than suit most home users, and perhaps some small home-based businesses. 

The quality of text and graphics on plain paper is very good, serifs are nice and crisp and there is very little bleeding. Photos printed on plain paper, on the other hand, do not look great – colours are very washed out and there’s obvious graining on the page. 

Fortunately, photos printed on glossy paper look fantastic, with results accurately matching the original. Prized holiday snaps, iconic selfies, and passport photos will all look when printed on glossy photo paper – see the comparison below.

Running Costs 

As you only have to buy two ink cartridges for the Canon Pixma TS7450 – black and colour – it’s easy to refill and replace what you want. 

Prices for the standard cartridges, according to Canon’s site are £17.49 each for the PG-560 black ink and CL-561 colour ink cartridges. Both of these promise on average, 180 pages, which makes for a running cost of 9p per page. 

However, you are far better off picking up some of the XL-sized cartridges. While these are more expensive at £24.49 and £19.99 respectively, the PG-560XL and CL-561XL promise 400 and 300 pages worth of black and colour ink, and are therefore represent a much lower running cost of 6p and 7p per page. 

A pack of 100 10x15mm GP-501 glossy sheets will cost £9.99, while a pack of A4-sized GP-501 paper costs £22.99.

Price And Availability

The Canon Pixma TS7450 is available in two colours, black (the TS7450) and white (the TS7451), with the same RRP of £79.99.

Argos has exclusive rights to sell the black TS7450 in the UK, but at the time of writing, it’s not available on Argos’s site. You can also get it from the official Canon store.

Currys PC World is currently selling the TS7451 for £79, while Amazon UK is selling it for a bit more at £119.

The Canon Pixma TS7450 is currently unavailable in the U.S. The price listed above is based on the UK RRP, and the current exchange rate.

It's good value for money but we have a chart of the best printers if you're not sure including the even cheaper Canon Pixma TS3350 MkII.

Verdict

The Canon Pixma TS7450 is a great value all-in-one printer. It’s easy to set up and use, has lots to offer buyers, though not without its snags, namely the mobile apps, which can be frustrating at times, though software updates should improve these.

Good print quality, versatility and reasonably low running costs make for a very attractive proposition.

Specs

• Colour Inkjet all-in-one printer, copier, scanner
• Ink type: Cartridges
• Print resolution: 4800 x 1200 dpi
• Scan resolution: 1200 x 2400 dpi
• Maximum paper size: A4
• Auto Document Feeder
• Dimensions: 206 x 403 x 364 mm (H x W x D)
• Weight 8.2kg

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About Wanni Arachchige Udara Madusanka Perera

Hey, I'm Perera! I will try to give you technology reviews(mobile,gadgets,smart watch & other technology things), Automobiles, News and entertainment for built up your knowledge.