The Canon Maxify GX5050 is an inkjet printer with a large ink capacity similar to the company’s Pixma G series ink tank printers. However, the Maxify GX series is aimed at office work, not home printing. The GX5050 sits at the bottom of the range, offering print-only functionality without scanning or copying, but is still priced at a relatively hefty £400.
However, things start to look more reasonable when you consider the reasons for this. First of all, this printer has the cheapest color printing we’ve seen, even compared to other ink tank printers.
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Canon Maxify GX5050 review: What do you get for your money?
The Canon Maxify GX5050 looks like an office printer. It is a rectangular white box measuring 399 x 416 x 238 mm (WDH) and weighing 9 kg. There’s a little black border around the screen and paper tray, and a splash of color around the ink tanks, but other than that, it’s fine.
There are two paper trays. One he has a 250-sheet A4 tray at the bottom of the printer and a second 100-sheet paper feeder at the top rear. This is useful for occasional additions of photo paper, envelopes, or stiffer cards.
Like Canon’s other ink tank printers, the Maxify GX5050 uses refillable tanks instead of cartridges, one for black, one for cyan, one for magenta, and one for yellow ink. These must be filled with ink before using the printer for the first time. Each color in the box contains enough to print 6,000 pages in black and white or 14,000 pages in color. Using the printer in economy mode only increases to 9,000 monochrome pages and 21,000 color pages.
Printers don’t require much physical control because they can’t do much more than print from a computer or mobile device. All you get is a small control panel on the front that hosts a simple two-line LCD and a handful of buttons used to access simple settings. can do.
To connect to the printer, connect it to your network via Ethernet or Wi-Fi, or connect it to a single computer via USB if you want to go offline.
Canon Maxify GX5050 review: Easy to use?
There are so few features that this printer is not enough to cause problems. Setup follows Canon’s tried and tested step-by-step procedure. You can follow these steps online from your computer or by downloading the mobile app. This includes everything from filling his tank of ink using the included bottle (which may sound daunting, but is actually quite easy) to organizing network connections.
Once the printer is operational, most functions are controlled from the device that is printing from. For example, in Windows you can open printer controls from the normal print dialog box and control everything you would normally manage from there.
Some of these can also be done from the software if you need to perform maintenance tasks. There are some inaccessible options that must be started from the built-in menus, but are easily accomplished using the printer’s control panel and LCD display.
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Canon Maxify GX5050 review: speed and running cost?
Running costs are the most attractive aspect of such an ink tank printer, and the Canon Maxify GX5050 does not disappoint in this regard. As you can see from the chart below, this office printer is an even better value than the home ink tank printer, printing in both monochrome and color at 0.2p each. (These figures are based on Canon’s own ink price and volume projections based on ISO/IEC 24712 standard printing patterns.)
For black-and-white printing, the price per page isn’t too high. This is the same for Epson ink tank printers (e.g. Epson EcoTank ET-1810) and consumer Canon ink tank printers. Color printing, however, is a whole different story, where pages produced by the Maxify GX5050 cost about half as much.
When you compare this to the printing cost of a standard inkjet printer such as the HP OfficeJet Pro 9022e, the savings are obvious, especially when printing in large volumes.
The Maxify GX5050 is also a fast printer, producing the first page of a job in 7 seconds compared to 16 seconds for the HP OfficeJet Pro 9022e. Consumer ink tank printers take longer, but that’s not particularly surprising.
It doesn’t mass produce pages as fast as the HP, but it comprehensively outperforms consumer ink tank printers at 20.3 A4 pages per minute in black and 5.7 pages per minute in color.
Maxify is set by default to print on both sides of a sheet, and Maxify prints fast even in this mode, outputting a color test document at a speed of 11.5ppm. (His Epson printer in this chart doesn’t have the option to automatically print double-sided, so the number is zero).
When it comes to printing photos, the Maxify GX5050 isn’t as fast as the HP OfficeJet Pro 9022e, but it’s significantly faster than comparable consumer ink tank printers.
Canon Maxify GX5050 review: How’s the print quality?
If you’re looking for the best print quality, the Canon Maxify GX5050 is not for you. Text printing is fine, but to the naked eye it’s not as crisp as the text output from the HP OfficeJet Pro 9022e. However, it’s pretty much what you’d expect from a consumer ink tank printer.
Business graphics also print well, but start to lag behind consumer printers when working in color. Prints lighter than the HP OfficeJet Pro 9022e can oversaturate light hues, so you can manage them a little more delicately.
In photo printing, it lags far behind the consumer models I’ve compared, but I wouldn’t recommend it at all as a photo printer. but not comparable to that produced by the Epson EcoTank ET-1810. With six inks, the Canon Pixma G650 offers a significant improvement in quality over the Maxify GX5050.
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Canon Maxify GX5050 Review: Should You Buy?
Canon isn’t cheap, and apart from automatic two-sided printing, it lacks features. And it’s not the final word on print quality, especially for photos and graphics. for photo printing).
However, there is one overwhelming factor that makes the Canon Maxify GX5050 a great buy. That’s an incredibly low printing cost. If you print a lot of documents and want to mass produce them as cheaply and efficiently as possible, this printer is the way to go.
