Canon PIXMA 6170 - Plenty of Features but, an Average Performance

While All-in-Ones are usually preferred because of their multiple capabilities, very seldom can they perform well in all respects. Canon has been manufacturing some good printers and now with the Pixma 6170, we will see whether they continue with their legacy.

Form Factor and Interface
The black glossy finish that the 6170 has is quite attractive to look at in a home or office environment. The printer weighs quite a bit at 9.2 kgs, which is not of utmost importance as we don’t really carry printers around daily. With dimensions of 470 x 368 x 173mm t is quite compact.

The Pixma 6170 doesn’t score well enough

In terms of build quality, we were quite disappointed by the flimsy and fragile parts of the printer. It’s quite likely that you might damage something if you’re not being careful enough. Although we didn’t have much of a problem while setting up the printer, we noticed these small niggles like a slightly loose front tray and flap for the SD card slots.

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Nice memory card support

Coming to the interface, the Pixma 6170 definitely makes printing look quite intuitive and easy. There are buttons for home, selection and also four directional keys to browse through the menu. What adds to the appeal is that these buttons are not physical but touch-sensitive ones that light up only when they are needed at a given time. For e.g. if you’re browsing through the menu, only the direction and “ok” buttons will light up.

Poor colours and average printing performance

The printer certainly earns brownie points for the kind of features it has to offer. There are slots for MS Duo, SD and CF memory cards and it also has Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n capabilities. The 6170 can print pictures through PictBridge which means you can print pictures directly from a camera without using a PC.

Performance
We ran the printer through its paces and what followed can only be described as a bittersweet experience. The 6170 has a toner saving mode which they call “fast” that not only saves up on ink, but also prints material a little faster. A single word document was printed only a second faster. We also tried printing copies of a mixture of pictures and text. While the standard mode printed at an approximate speed of 18.7 seconds per page, the fast mode could dole out the same at 12.3 seconds per page which is quite a difference.

We also printed a colour image that included different levels of details and could make out that the 6170 performed at a very average level. There were some white horizontal lines across the picture and the image on the whole appeared quite grainy. The colours were very poor, appeared washed out and were not very accurate. For e.g. the Yellow appeared to be very pale and the red looked more like orange. The details also took quite a beating and even after using a magnifying glass they didn’t appear well enough. However, if you’re not very particular about colours, a colour print out will appear just about okay.

Support for Ethernet and Wi-FI as well

We also noted that text documents printed in the standard mode saw blotting of ink. While the same wasn’t visible in the fast mode, fine print in this mode was very poor.

Verdict
The Canon’s Pixma 6170 is priced at Rs. 15,725. If you consider the various features it has to offer, then it could have easily made the value for money category. However, with very standard performance the Pixma 6170 doesn’t satisfy us completely. You can check out the Pixma 5270 which doesn’t have all the features that this one has, but will cost you about Rs. 10,500.