Canon Maxify GX7150

Refillable, flexible and thoroughly likeable-but it's only good value if you print a huge volume

- SIMON HANDBY

We love a refillable inkjet. Farewell stingy cartridges, high running costs and wasted plastic; hello simple, cheap bottles of ink and extended service intervals. Canon’s Maxify range is geared towards home power users and busy small offices, and the GX7150 its new range-topping refillable multifunction peripheral (MFP).

This is a four-in-one, combining print, scan, copy and fax. On top, an automatic document feeder (ADF) juggles up to 50 sheets of paper; behind it sits a 100-sheet multipurpose paper tray; and the base holds dual 250-sheet paper cassettes. Both the printer and ADF support duplex operation, making double-sided prints, scans, copies and faxes a reality.

You can connect this printer via USB, wired Ethernet or WiFi. Everything is controlled by the 2.7in tiltable colour touchscreen and a smattering of dedicated buttons. The only omissions are a USB host port for walkup scans and prints, and SME-grade options such as extended trays, staplers or NFC readers.

The GX7150 arrives with enough ink to print around 6,000 black or 14,000 colour pages. Dividing its purchase price by 6,000 gives you a cost per page of around 7.3p (8.8p inc VAT), on a par with competing cartridge-based inkjets - and at that point you'd still have enough colour ink left for around 8,000 further pages. Ongoing refills work out at only 0.2p per black page and 0.4p in colour - roughly a tenth the cost of a conventional inkjet.