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The Canon Pixma MX350 printer is aimed at the small office or home use. It includes a fax and a automatic document feeder.
Possibly the most unusual feature for this mainly business machine is the 62mm colour LCD display set into the middle of the control panel. This is ideal for showing copy parameters, menus and thumbnails of photographs for selection. It works well alongside Canon’s trademark click-wheel, which you can run your digit around to flip through menu options, as well as pressing in four directions for selection .
The printer has 4 function keys along with a number pad for fax dialling. The function keys are for fax, photo upload, plus copy and scanning .
It has the one paper tray, which holds 11 sheets of normal 80 – 100 gram paper
Set into the curved right-hand edge of the machine is a hinged cover that hides three memory card slots. There’s a PictBridge socket below this, which doubles as a connection for USB drives .
At the back are sockets for USB and Ethernet connections, but many people will use the built-in wireless setup wizard to connect directly to a Wi-Fi router. This is a simple process, even if you have to enter a passkey .
There are just two printer cartridges - one back and the other tri-colour – that clip into the machines heads. Canon ink cartridges numbers are PGI-512 & CLI-513 for the high capacity versions which is the cheapest way to buy them.
Canon claims print speeds of over 8 pages per minute for black, and just a tad under 5 pages for colour. We managed 5.5 for black and just 2.5 pages per minute for colour, which is not great.
Finally, photo prints in standard mode took just over 50 seconds, while in best mode the time rose to 1min 24secs. Good speeds, but beaten by some rivals.
Print quality is good, with clear sharp black text and bright solid colours
Photo prints, as we’ve come to expect from Canon, are very good, with smoothly gradated fills, such as in areas of sky, and plenty of detail in intricate sections of an image. They only fall down is in dark, shadowed areas, where some detail is lost. Not at all bad for a four-colour print, though.
The two ink cartridges are each available in standard and high-yield versions and, as usual, we use the high-yield consumables to calculate running costs, since these give the best economy. At the cheapest Internet prices we could find, we calculate a black page cost of 4p and a colour cost of 8.6p. This was for genuine Canon cartridges. Compatible cartridges will be available shortly we understand
Verdict
The canon MX350 is a nice quality compact printer, but the price tag does seem a little pricey at around £150. Well worth consideration though.
