Canon Pixma TS205 review

Unlike a lot of entry-level home printers, which feature built-in scanner beds and photocopiers, the Pixma TS205 is a straightforward colour inkjet printer, which connects to desktop and laptop computers via a USB cable. A simple plug-and-play printer, no Wi-Fi passwords or network configuration is required here.

Using just two cartridges, the Canon Pixma TS205 is as easy to refill as it is to use and is capable of printing on high-quality glossy photo paper as well as plain old A4.

In our full review, we look beyond the RRP and running costs to see if there’s more to the Canon Pixma TS205 than an attractive price and if it remains a bargain three years down the line.

Jump to:

• Canon Pixma TS205 review: summary
• What is the Canon Pixma TS205?
• How much is the Canon Pixma TS205?
• How fast is the Canon Pixma TS205?
• Canon Pixma TS205 print quality
• Canon Pixma TS205 running costs
• Canon Pixma TS205 ease of use
• Our verdict
• Where to buy

Canon Pixma TS205 review: summary

Price: £35.49

Key features:

• Not wireless
• Prints on office paper and glossy paper
• Uses two cartridges

Pros:

• Very cheap to buy and run
• Good overall print quality
• Easy to set up and use

Cons:

• Slow printing speeds
• Ink smudges easily
• No Wi-Fi or mobile app support

What is the Canon Pixma TS205?

The Canon Pixma TS205 is a USB colour inkjet printed priced at the extremely affordable £35 mark.

Very much a budget printer, the Canon Pixma TS205 is aimed squarely at people who only need to print a few documents and photos from their laptop or desktop every so often and aren’t fussed about scanning and copying.

As it’s not a wireless printer – you can’t connect to it via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth – you can’t print anything directly from your phone. This is a super-basic, no-frills, cheap-as-chips printer.

Like the Canon Pixma TS7450, the TS205 uses two cartridges, one black ink and another with colour inks (cyan, magenta, and yellow). While the standard-sized cartridges don’t have an especially high yield, for a bit more money, you can pick up bigger XL cartridges, which are much better value.

As well as being cheap to buy and reasonably cheap to run, the Canon Pixma TS205 is capable of printing on both plain office paper and glossy photo paper, so you can run off boarding passes and then print out your holiday snaps in high definition when you get back.

What does the Canon Pixma TS205 do?

The Canon Pixma TS205 is an inexpensive colour printer that has the following key features and specifications:

• Ink type: Cartridge (PG-545 black, CL-546 cyan, magenta, yellow ink)
• Cost per page: 9-11p / 5-7p
• Print resolution: Up to 48001 x 1200 dpi
• Scanner resolution: n/a
• Print speed: 7.85ppm
• Paper tray capacity: 60 plain A4
• OS: Windows, Mac OS
• Dimensions: 131 x 426 x 255mm
• Weight: 2.5kg

How much is the Canon Pixma TS205?

Canon sells the TS205 for £35.49.

At the time of writing, the BT Shop has the best deal of them all, selling the TS205 for £24.42, while Amazon currently has it for £48.59.

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How fast is the Canon Pixma TS205?

The Canon Pixma TS205 is quick enough if you’re printing off a couple of sheets at a time, but it’s by no means a fast printer – something you’ll notice when you come to print off big documents with 20+ pages. That said, it’s quick to pick up print requests, with jobs beginning a couple of seconds or so after the request was sent.

Given that it’s intended to be a printer for personal home use and not a home office printer, this is fine. Just be warned that if you need to print off a presentation, or multiple copies of a single-page document, you could be waiting a while – put the kettle on before you start printing.

When printing off a series of test documents and images, we recorded the following speeds:

Canon Pixma TS205 speed test – text and graphics

Canon Pixma TS205 speed test – photos

Canon Pixma TS205 print quality

Document text printed by the Pixma TS205 looks nice and well-defined, better than you might expect from a £35 printer – but be warned that the ink takes a few seconds to dry. Documents are very prone to smudging as they emerge from the printer. If you so much as brush a paragraph with your thumb, you’ll ruin a perfectly good printout.

Graphics are less nice-looking, with solid blocks of colour on pie charts and graphs looking grainy and having that stratified look you sometimes get with inkjet printers.

Thankfully, while photos don’t look great printed on plain paper, they look excellent on glossy photo paper. We printed the same test image on Canon’s GP-501 4 x 6 (10 x 15) photo paper and the PP-201 A4-sized photo paper and got some nice results, on par with what we saw produced by the Canon Pixma TS7450 and Epson EcoTank ET-2750.

Canon Pixma TS205 running costs

The Canon Pixma TS205 costs about the same to run as most inkjet printers. You’ll be looking to pay about £15-£20 per cartridge, and you get the same sort of mileage as you would out of the cartridges used by printers like the TS7450.

While the standard-sized cartridges promise you around 180 pages’ worth of ink, if you want to make a saving, your best bet is to go for the XL cartridges, which promise 300-400 pages’ worth.

The prices listed below are the standard RRP taken from Canon’s UK site. Note that Canon sometimes bundles cartridges together, so you can make savings there, as well as shopping around on Cartridge People and Ryman.

Canon Pixma TS205 ease of use

The Canon Pixma TS205 is small and lightweight, weighing just 2.5kg and measuring 131 x 426 x 255mm. Not only does it not take up much desk room at all, but it’s also very easy to shift around.

Everything feels pretty solid, too, with the exception of the cartridge cradle. Not only is it quite hard to slot the 545/546 cartridges into place, but the cradle itself also doesn’t feel terribly robust. While the TS205 is quite light overall, it looks quite premium. The cartridge cradle is the only thing that really feels ‘cheap’.

Setting up the Canon Pixma TS205 is relatively easy. Windows users can make use of the supplied CD or download drivers from Canon’s site. Mac users can follow the same link – the page will detect which operating system and which version you’re using and offer the relevant files to download. Downloading and installing everything should take between 5-15 minutes, depending on your internet connection speed.

Controls on the device are very limited – there’s no LED display – but despite that, the TS205 is easy to operate. There’s an on/off switch, a control for running a quick print levels/head alignment test, and a control that lets you manually switch print settings if you’re using different sized paper. Nine times out of ten during testing, the Canon Pixma TS205 would automatically detect when we were using different sized paper and adjust settings anyway.

The only other thing to note is that no USB cable is supplied with the TS205, so it’s not ready to go out of the box. Luckily, the kind of USB cable you’ll need – one with the squarish Type-B USB connection – is cheap and easy to come by.

Our verdict: Should you buy the Canon Pixma TS205?

The Canon Pixma TS205 is easy to use, is reasonably cost-effective to run, and produces better results than you might expect from a £35 printer.

That said, it’s not without its flaws, namely that freshly-printed documents are prone to smudging and that its graphics are of so-so quality. For personal use, this will likely not matter, but for professional-grade results, you’ll need a professional-grade printer.

Where to buy the Canon Pixma TS205:

• Amazon
• BT Shop

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