IJ Start Canon G650– The Canon Pixma G650 is MegaTank printers that use bottles of ink poured into large tanks, rather than more traditional cartridges.
Previously, when buying a Canon printer, you had to make a choice between the extremely affordable running costs of MegaTanks, or the exceptional photo print quality of its cartridge-based printer. No longer. The Canon Pixma G650 delivers both.
For your 235lbs, you get a fairly thick device, although at 445 x 340 x 167mm (WDH) and 6.6kg it’s a bit wild and lighter than the previous ink tank models we’ve seen.
That means a touch more table-friendly than ever before, but at the expense of a few features. The Pixma G650 does not come with a secondary paper tray – only a rear 100-sheet paper feeder – and the copier does not have an automatic paper feeder.
The control panel is on top of the unit, so you can easily configure the printer while standing in front of it. It’s located to the left of the scanner lid and has the standard two-line LCD screen that all Canon MegaTank devices have.
There are two large copy buttons to start a mono or color copy manually, and several buttons to help you navigate the built-in menus. They’re all pretty easy to use, but you’ll probably barely touch them because most of the time you’ll be controlling the printer from the device you’re printing from.
In this case, you can connect the printer to your PC using its USB port, or add it to your wireless network if you want to be able to print from your phone or tablet. There’s no Ethernet port, and there’s no option to print directly from a USB thumb drive or hard disk.
Easy to use?
Canon has taken its share of Epson’s book when it comes to filling ink tanks, increasing usability significantly. On older models, you had to match the ink bottle to the correct tank, then squeeze the bottle to release the ink, with nothing else to prevent accidental color mismatches.
This is Canon’s first attempt to eliminate potential errors and now each bottle has a molded neck and is given a lock, so it can only be poured into the correct tank. Once the bottle is in place, the ink slowly escapes into the tank without being squeezed out.
Where you type the name of your new printer and get an illustrated guide to the installation process, from removing the packing tape to setting up Wi-Fi. If you want more detail, there is a link to the video to guide you further. It covers all the bases without getting confident users stuck in unwanted details.
Once up and running, the printer is easy to use. Printing from a PC is a breeze, connecting seamlessly to Windows’ own printers. If you want more, Canon printer controls are available, allowing you to access additional functions. There are also apps available to help you print from your preferred mobile device, while Mac support is provided via AirPrint.
One area that is a little disappointing is duplex printing. Although the option to double-sided printing is present in the Canon printer software, the printer does not do this automatically. Instead, when you select an option, the printer shuffles through the first side of the page, then prompts you to load the output back into the rear paper tray. While there are many guides on how to reload paper, it is not as easy as with a printer that can perform this standard task automatically.
What is the Print Quality?
Here’s the big question: do two additional ink colors improve print quality? The answer is yes. Printing photos onto standard glossy photo paper produces phenomenal results.
Where it doesn’t hold up is copy quality. Colored copies, in particular, I find very faded. This is apparently because the built-in scanner, which has lowered the scanning resolution compared to the previous model, only offers 600 x 1,200 ppi compared to 1,200 x 2,400 ppi on the older G7050 and TS8350 models. Standard photo scans are fine but not as detailed as the scans produced on this older model. If scanning photos is more important to you than printing them, choose another printer.
speed and cost of operation?
Canon provides one bottle of each of the six colors required with this printer. According to the results Canon quoted, that should be enough to print 3,700 mono pages or 8,000 in color.
With replacement bottles of the same size costing £14 each, the additional mono prints cost 0.4p each, while the colored prints cost 1p.
Printing multiple pages doesn’t do much to speed things up, with mono prints arriving at a relatively glacial speed of 3.4ppm (compared to the 10.4ppm you’ll get from the G7050), while color prints hit speeds of 2.2ppm. It’s not too far behind, with the G7050 hitting just 2.4ppm.
duplex printing is fast competing, because it doesn’t wait for each page to dry before printing the next. The G650 prints both sides of a color document at 1.7ppm, including the fumbled midpoint of paper reloads, while the G7050 automatically hits just 1.5ppm.
Should you buy it?
The main reason to buy one was to reduce the high levels of cost and waste that go into cartridge-based inkjet printers and, while the new six-color system doesn’t quite match Canon’s ridiculously low price per page of four-color MegaTanks.
The previous compromise was print speed and quality. Canon has done nothing to increase the speed of this model – in fact, it is slower than other MegaTank models. However, for the average home user, page shift rate tends to be less of a concern than print quality and, in this area, the G650 is a win. Photo printing quality on this model has reached its peak, going a long way to match the vibrancy and quality of photo prints previously only seen in its cartridge printers. ij start cannon
IJ Start Canon PIXMA G650 Setup Driver Support for:
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- Android
- Linux x32 x64
- Mac Os
- Windows 10 x32 x 64
- Windows 8.1 x32 x 64
- Windows 7 x32 x 64
- Windows XP x32 x 64
Canon PIXMA G650 Driver for Windows
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Canon Driver Download & Software Package
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Canon PIXMA G650 Easy-Layout Editor Printer Driver Windows
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Canon PIXMA G650 MP Driver
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