Helping your Home School Printing without Breaking the Bank
AD – This post is in collaboration with Cartridge People
Happy Half Term! Well; we’ve only gone and done it. After 6 whole weeks of home schooling stress; trying to find the right lead to connect our old dusty printer to our laptop, grappling with never ending paper jams and printer faults and attempting to print yet another bloody Twinkl worksheet, we’ve got through an entire half term of home schooling. It’s not been easy and we all deserve a huge pat on the back. There have been a few meltdowns (mostly mine) at at least one occasion where I literally wanted to throw our ancient printer out of the window. I’ve learned a few things about myself during lockdown – 1. I have no patience 2. Teaching fractions is not my forte and 3. It’s time I updated our kit.
Cartridge People are home to a huge range of printers and printer supplies from leading brands such as Canon, Brother, Epson and HP, but also enable families like mine to support their children’s home schooling without needing to stomach the often huge cost of branded ink cartridges. They offer a wide range of own brand ink and toner cartridges that produce the same yield and print quality without breaking the bank and even come with a lifetime printer guarantee – so you can purchase with complete peace of mind. With at least a few weeks of guaranteed home schooling to come in 2021 and the potential for other extended periods at home, I decided to put some of their kit to the test!
We were sent a Canon Pixma TS5050 from their wide range of printers and having already experienced one printer error too many – I was desperate to put this to the test!
About the Canon Pixma TS5050
The Canon Pixma TS5050 is an ideal mid price printer for families – a printer that won’t break the bank but doesn’t compensate on features as a result.
Fairly compact and light, the Canon TS5050 printer is smart and attractive to look at, with rounded corners, a pull out paper tray at the rear and an output tray to the front – both of which can be folded away when the printer not in use. The paper tray feeds manually during printing and can hold around 100 sheets of regular paper at a time.
The Canon TS5050 printer is a printer that can print, scan and copy, making it the ideal home schooling companion for printing off lesson plans as well a uploading and submitting your children’s completed work. It has a large colour 3 inch display to the front, with large simple buttons making it super straightforward to navigate between the different settings.
Printer Set Up
Printer set up for the Canon Pixma TS5050 was super easy – even for someone like me who normally asks someone else to kick start the set up for me!
With the Canon Air Print option, you can download the Canon iOS or Google Play app and print wirelessly straight from your phone or device – you don’t even need to connect it to your laptop if you don’t want/need to! This also means that multiple devices in the same household can be set up to print, which is ideal if you and your partner are both working from home together – there’s no faffing around with leads and cables as using the printer is all done wirelessly.
You can also print straight from an SD card should you need to, which may be helpful if you have been passed on documents in a format other than email.
Print Quality
The print quality on the Canon Pixma TS5050 was very good – both for printing documents with a large amount of text and for more visual based documents and photographs. Whilst not the fastest printer we have ever had, for an ink jet printer, I found it to be fairly efficient – printing even a high pixel colour images like the one below in just over a minute.
The photocopying function is also very good, with the only slight critique for both printing and copying is that there is no automatic duplex mode. If you do want to print double sided therefore, you therefore need to do this manually. We didn’t find this a big issue.
Ink Cartridges for the Canon Pixma TS5050
Unlike some printers where the whole cartridge has to be replaced when the blank runs out, the Canon Pixma TS5050 has individual cartridges which I found to be a real positive. this means If you get through a lot of black ink you can simply replace that one and leave the others in place and fully functioning.
If you are trying to save ink and print more efficiently, the printer also come with the option to print in ‘draft’ mode which uses less ink per print but is perfectly adequate for homeschooling worksheets etc – simply printing in a grey and lighter font.
Cartridge People offer a huge range of own brand ink cartridges that can massively reduce the amount you have to spend whilst matching the quality and yield – often providing more prints per cartridge than the originals. The Printer itself comes with starter cartridges to set you off, but when these run out, I can order fully compatible cartridges from Cartridge People ready to replace them as required.
Cartridge Peoples’ Promise
As a leading printer consumables supplier of ink and toner cartridges for the UK, Cartridge People’s mission is to bring us the best products at the lowest prices, whether that’s laser printer toner cartridges or ink cartridges.
There is a common misconception about using compatible cartridges in your printer with many people wrongly believing that such cartridges will invalidate warranties on your printer if the machine develops a fault.
This is where the Cartridge People’s promise comes in. The Cartridge People have in place a Lifetime Printer Guarantee so you can buy their own branded cartridges with confidence. This means that if a Cartridge People own brand cartridge has caused an issue with your inkjet or laser printer, they will cover the cost of repairing the machine and if necessary, replace the printer free of charge.
In the meantime, you can benefit from significant savings by making the switch from originals to Cartridge People’s own brand products. You can even pick up other printing and office supplies like paper, labels and stationery all under one roof.
Our Overall Verdict
Overall; we are really happy with the Canon Pixma TS5050 – it makes printing super easy and efficient without having to spend ages pressing buttons and amending settings. With us all juggling multiple plates at the moment; trying to balance home schooling and working from home; the printer has been a really valuable asset to our family!
Want to win a Canon Pixma TS5050 Printer?
With at least a few weeks of (guarenteed) home schooling to get through (and the potential for other periods of homeschooling in 2021) wouldn’t it be lovely to have a printer that helped you support their school work without the headache?
Thanks to the team at Cartridge People we have 1 x Canon TS5050 printer to giveaway to one lucky reader. To enter, please use the gleam app below. UK entries only. Giveaway opens 14th February 2021 and closes 11.59pm on 21st February 2021. Our standard giveaway terms and conditions apply. GOOD LUCK!
