Single-function, basic inkjet printers suitable for the home or home office haven't quite gone the way of the dinosaur, or even the not-quite-extinct dot matrix printer, but they're growing rare. More and more, standard inkjet printers are being replaced with all-in-ones (AIOs) on the one hand and heavily photocentric printers on the other. The Canon Pixma iP4600 ($99.99 direct) is one of the few inexpensive inkjets that still qualify for the standard inkjet category, although even it includes a few photocentric touches, most notably a PictBridge connector.

As the number of single-function inkjet printers has dwindled, the printers have devolved enough so that there isn't a current Editors' Choice in this category. The last printer to earn that designation was the Canon Pixma iP4300, a direct ancestor of the iP4600.

When Canon replaced the iP4300 with the nearly identical but more expensive Pixma iP4500 (there was no iP4400), that unit's higher price was enough to keep it from earning an Editors' Choice. The iP4600 drops the price back to where it was for the iP4300, but it also loses print speed, which has long been one of the great strengths of Canon's Pixma printers. The step down in speed is enough to keep the iP4600 out of contention for Editors' Choice, leaving the category still without a current winner.

Like earlier models, the iP4600 offers excellent paper handling. Two paper trays give you the choice of loading 150 sheets of plain paper in each or loading plain paper into one and photo paper into the other. The first choice lets you have a more-than-ample 300 sheets loaded at a time. The second lets you switch between printing standard documents and photos without having to swap paper in the tray, and it still gives you more input capacity than you'll get from many printers aimed at the home and home office. Even better, the printer also includes an automatic duplexer to let you print on both sides of a page.

Setup is standard for a Canon printer. Set the 6-by-11.7-by-17-inch (HWD) iP4600 in place, remove the packing materials, then plug in the power cord, snap in the printhead and five ink cartridges, and load paper. Next, run the automated setup program from the disc, then plug in the USB cable when the program tells you to. The five ink cartridges, one for each color, are for cyan, yellow, magenta, and two versions of black—a pigment-based black for text and a dye-based black for photos.

As I've already mentioned, the iP4600 is slower than the model it replaces. Ratings for inkjets aren't particularly meaningful because the printers never actually live up to them in practice, but as a point of reference, the iP4500 was rated at 31 pages per minute (ppm) for monochrome and 24 ppm for color. The iP4600, though, is rated at only 26 ppm for monochrome and 21 ppm for color.

On our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software, www.qualitylogic.com), the iP4600 took 16 minutes 11 seconds. That's easily in the tolerable range for an inkjet but significantly slower than, for example, the HP Photosmart D7560 Printer, which came in at 12:23 (essentially tied for time with the iP4500). Speed for photos is a little better relative to that of other inkjets, averaging 1:08 for each 4-by-6 and 1:56 for each 8-by-10. The HP printer came in a bit slower, at 1:32 and 2:33, respectively.

The iP4600's output quality is a touch below par for an inkjet for text, a bit above par for photos, and typical for graphics. More than half of the fonts on our text tests were both easily readable and well formed at 8 points, with some passing both thresholds even at 5 points. One heavily stylized font with thick strokes needed 20 points to pass both tests, but that's common for inkjets. Unless you have an unusual need for small fonts, the output should be suitable for most business, school, and home uses.

Graphics are good enough for any internal business use, with no serious flaws other than a tendency to lose thin lines. As long as you stay away from thin lines, however, most people would consider the output good enough to hand to an important client or customer they wanted to impress with their professionalism. As with some other Canon printers, when printing full-page graphics, the ink has a tendency to curl the plain paper we test with, so you may need to invest in a more expensive, heavier-weight paper if you plan to print a lot of graphics.

The prints on my tests all easily qualified as true photo quality—better than you would expect from a typical drugstore, although not quite a match for a professional photo lab or the output from top-tier, much-more-expensive photo printers. The iP4600 even did a reasonable job on monochrome photos, which are a problem for many printers.

Although the step down in speed is a bit of a disappointment, the Canon Pixma iP4600 offers a more-than-reasonable balance of output quality, paper handling, and price. If you're looking for a basic, no-frills, inexpensive inkjet printer, the iP4600 definitely belongs on your short list.

Check out the Canon Pixma iP4600's performance test results.

More Ink Jet Printer Reviews: