Sets the right tone
PRINTER | £150 from Amazon www.snipca.com/49230
This striking device is made from a mix of textured, shiny and translucent black plastics. These eclectic surface types can’t really hide the fact that it’s just a large black box, and it doesn’t stray far from the usual basics of placing the A4 scanner at the top and a 100-sheet paper tray at the rear. There’s also a 100-sheet paper cassette that sits at the bottom of the device, jutting out slightly at the front (pictured right).
With manufacturers like Canon making a big push on refillable ink-tank printers, it almost makes you feel nostalgic when fitting the TS8750’s six supplied cartridges. They’re easy to insert and, although it’s possible to push them in the wrong slots if you’re not careful, the printer won’t launch until it detects that everything is where it should be.
This printer augments the standard black, cyan, magenta and yellow setup with a grey and second black cartridge. The three colours, grey and smaller black cartridges all contain dye-based inks, which are ideal for photo printing. The main black cartridge is pigmented to produce strong black text on plain paper.
The downside of this is the running costs. Colour prints cost around 10p per page, while black text will cost 3.5p. That’s manageable if your printing load is light, but will stack up if it isn’t.
When you start printing, the motorised paper-output tray emerges automatically – tilting the front panel upwards – shortly followed by your first page. This is a slick party piece, but it’s only partially reversed when you turn the device off because the panel stays slightly open.
The chunky SD card slot might seem like a relic to anyone who takes photos on a smartphone, but it makes sense when many high-end cameras still use memory cards for storage. Insert your card, however, and the single-shot onscreen preview isn’t particularly helpful. You can pull up a multi-frame view so it’s easier to find specific shots among a selection, but it won’t let you select more than one at a time.
We had a few other design quibbles. There’s a handy lip that makes it easy to pull out the main paper cassette, but unfortunately it’s obscured once the output tray is extended. Also, the paper-output tray has a flip-up stopper that’s useful for reining in multiple pages on longer print jobs, but it’s not extended automatically when the tray emerges.
To test it we sent the TS8750 our usual mix
