Document feeding with Canon Pixma Endurance G4600 printer

A month ago I wrote a quite glowing review of the Canon Pixma G3600 inject printer (and scanner and copier).  My focus was on its economy, thanks to the 7000 colour and 6000 black and white pages it is rated for, right out of the box. Now Canon has added a new model with the model number bumped up by a thousand to G4600. This adds some additional features which will be very useful to many small businesses.

What remains the same looks to be the printer engine, which can deliver very impressive photographs with suitable paper, fine business documents and of course brilliant economy. I calculated for the G3600 a cost of half a cent per page for black and white prints, and a little over a cent per page for colour ones (0.357 cents per colour).

The G4600 uses the same ink tanks in the same locations and filled by the same ink bottles as the G3600. It also delivers the same print speed and resolution (up to 4800 by 1200 dpi), and optical scanning resolution (600 by 1200 dpi). The G3600 was pretty snappy on getting out business quality prints and copies, and somewhat slower on high resolution photos. Quality is worth waiting for.

What the Canon Pixma Endurance G4600 printer adds is mostly a significantly improved copying function. It features an automatic document feeder, along with a proper copier style keypad so you can specify the number of copies you want. There’s also a two line LCD screen so that you can see what’s going on.

So if printing is your thing, with the occasional need for a one-off copy, the G3600 is the way to go. But if you’re making multiple copies, especially of multipage documents, the G4600 looks to be the better suited device.

The Canon Pixma Endurance G4600 printer is available from Officeworks for $559, or just sixty dollars more than the G3600.