Reviewed on: March 2019
Suitable For
Home office use where use is relatively light.
Features & Connectivity
The Canon TR4550 printer comes with all the bells and whistles you'd want in a small home printer. You've got 2 sided printing... scanning... lots of way to connect. It's a great little machine:
- Scan, Copy & Fax
- Auto duplex printing
- 100 sheet input tray
- Wireless and USB connectivity
- Apple Airprint
- Amazon Alexa compatible
- Mono printing up to 9ppm
- Colour printing up to 4ppm
- Automatic document feeder
- Borderless photo printing
Printer Speed & Quality
The Canon Pixma TR4550 is fairly standard for home printer performance, with the exact print quality and speed you'd expect for a machine aimed at a home user. Speeds are on par with any other low cost home machine, with up to 9ppm for black printing and up to 4ppm for colour. A borderless 6x4" print takes about 65 seconds.
Print quality is "reliable", with clean and crisp document printing backed up by respectable photo printing. If you'll be printing mainly images you shouldn't be looking at this printer anyway, as it's more of an all-round workhorse than image printer, and for the standard home user the quality is more than good enough.
Cartridges & Running Costs
The Canon TR4550 uses PG-545 and CL-546 FINE printer cartridges. These cartridges have the printheads built into them, which is why they're expensive to buy, but it means that if you print very rarely, or go periods you don't print at all, if the ink dries up you only have to replace the cartridge and won't do damage to your printer.
Only taking 2 inks does mean the TR4550 Canon printer is more expensive to run though, as when one of the colours runs out the whole tri-colour cartridge needs to be replaced. Standard capacity original inks are the most expensive way to print using this printer at ~8p per page. While high capacity originals cost a little more they work out considerably cheaper when it comes to printing at ~5.8p per page. Compatibles represent the best value, costing just 4.7p per page. Canon promotes the use of high capacity cartridges with the claim you can save up to 30%, however there's no escaping from the fact that this printer isn't cheap to run and is definitely aimed at people who will print fairly infrequently.
Who Should Buy This Printer
This machine is ideal for anyone needing a printer/scanner combination to keep their home ticking over, and don't need to print large amounts. What it does, it does well, just make sure you're not printing more than 100 pages a month or you'll find your costs mounting quite quickly.
