There’s a rather pointless internet meme, known as ‘Math Lady’, depicts a character from the Brazilian soap opera Senhora do Destino looking very confused, overlaid with obscure formulae. This perfectly expressed our faces when we set up and review the Canon Pixma TS305 Review.
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Unusually for a consumer inkjet printer in 2018, it’s just a printer, with no built-in flatbed scanner to digitise paper documents. To make up for this, Canon has come up with a cunning ruse. The top panel, which is flat and tilted helpfully to the front, is marked with white one-inch squares (see main image). Line up a page on this, open the Canon Print app on your smartphone, and you can take a picture of it, which is automatically de-skewed. You can then save the image, like a scan, or print it, like a photocopy.
A confusing, slow printer, with no scanner and high running costs
CANON PIXMA TS305 REVIEW: SPECIFICATIONS
4800x1200dpi maximum print resolution • 60-sheet top feed • USB 2.0 • 802.11n Wi-Fi • 143x430x282mm (Hx WxD) • 2.9kg • One-year warranty
What makes this so mind-boggling is that the Pixma TS305 sells for about the same as the Pixma TS3150, which is basically the same printer with a built-in scanner. So the whole rigmarole of fiddling about with a separate device to try to take a sharp photo of a piece of paper exists purely for people who would rather do that than open a lid, plonk the paper on top, close the lid, press a button and get a perfect result.
The TS305 has all the usual Wifi and online-storage features, and works fine as a printer, if you only care about how good the print-out looks, not that it took ages and cost you nearly 10p per colour page in ink (about twice as much as with some pricier printers). Of course, that’s where Canon gets your money. To waste even more, the three colour inks come in a single cartridge, which you’ll have to replace when any one of them runs out.
It refused to print a full A4 photo, but postcard-sized prints looked very good. Our 24-page colour graphics document emerged at a glacial 1.6 pages per minute (ppm), while plain black text peaked at 7.5ppm. A lower-quality draft mode may save a bit of ink but doesn’t speed things up. At least all the lumbering, wheezing and scraping noises kept us entertained while we waited, not to mention pages escaping the output tray and having to be rounded up. The input tray takes just 60 sheets, an eighth of a pack.
Canon Pixma TS305 Review: VERDICT
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