Canon Pixma MX330

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/printers/0,39030163,49302562,00.htm

Reviewed 10 June 2009

Reviewed by Justin Yu

Just because you're on a budget doesn't mean you have to buy a cheap printer that can't function outside of simple text documents. If you need a device that can fax, copy, scan and print on a wide variety of media, the Canon Pixma MX330 will make a perfect addition to your home office.

At around £100, this all-in-one printer aims to boost productivity by adding an automatic document feeder and a full-colour, 46mm (1.8-inch) LCD display. Although we have some complaints about the output quality, we can't argue with the bundle of features and the excellent value that the MX330 represents.

Design and features
The MX330's design is streamlined so that every drawer, tray and port folds flush into the body. The result is a very sleek, matte black and grey exterior, with all of the buttons you need to adjust the settings conveniently placed on the front panel. Since the default function is to print, the rest of the hot keys (copy, fax and scan) are the largest on the panel, surrounded by the power button, two small LEDs that indicate usage, and a blinking alarm for low ink or paper jams.

The bright LCD screen sits prominently in the middle of the control panel. While we're normally used to adjusting the angle of the screens on Pixma printers, we're thankful that Canon has included an LCD at all at this price. The rest of the controls include shortcut buttons for 'menu', 'settings' and 'back'; a directional pad and corresponding 'OK' button for navigating through menus; fax shortcuts for quality, coded dialling and redials; two buttons for black and colour copies; and a 'stop print' button for emergency cancellations. Overall, the MX330 measures a manoeuvrable 460 by 198 by 411mm.

All the MX330's drawers, trays and ports fold into the body, making for a streamlined design

Most all-in-one printers typically don't include automatic document feeders at this price point, so we're happy to see that Canon has included one, making it much easier to scan or copy stacks of documents. The automatic document feeder can only handle up to 30 pages at a time, so the majority of your blank media goes through the rear input tray, which holds 100 pages. A plastic guide folds out of the rear tray to handle larger media.

Output is a much more simplified process: all outbound prints pop out of the front drawer onto an angled lip that folds out of the main body. We're disappointed to see that the MX330 doesn't include a multimedia card reader for direct prints, but you can hook up a digital camera directly to the printer through the PictBridge USB port on the bottom of the unit.

The top of the printer lifts open to reveal the standard 216 by 279mm scanner bay, but you can also pop that open and access the bay for two ink cartridges below. To keep costs low, the MX330 only uses two ink cartridges: one for black and one for colours. While we prefer five or sometimes even six separate cartridge tanks, to cut down on the cost of consumables, it makes sense that a printer at this price only has two tanks. If you plan to use your printer for numerous photo prints or graphical documents, a printer with separate ink cartridge bays will prove more economical.

The package includes a driver CD with all the installation files you need to customise your prints. Among the settings, you can choose between commonly used templates, like standard, business, paper-saving and photo-printing, which adjust the type of media, paper size and source. Additionally, the driver CD provides you with adjustments for borderless printing, vivid photos, greyscale prints, and even manual colour intensities by numeral increments.

There's also a pop-up print-status monitor that shows the current job, document name, device owner, status and a graphical representation of the ink-cartridge levels. Conveniently, this pop-up monitor automatically disappears once a job is finished printing, but we prefer status monitors that show us the page and progress of the print.

The driver also automatically installs Canon's Easy-PhotoPrint EX software onto your computer. This software allows you to flaunt all the creative features of the MX330. It lets you print simple snapshot photos on the fly, create whole albums of artwork, print calendars with custom pictures, and print custom stickers using Canon's proprietary sticker paper.

The explorer window on the main page works just like a Windows Explorer pane. But we prefer HP's Solution Center layout, which automatically scans and detects printable pictures on your hard drive for you. Canon's creative suite is incredibly easy to use, however, and even lets you make simple photo edits, like red-eye correction, face sharpening and blemish removal, which is great for users that don't want to deal with the hassle of third-party editing software like Adobe Photoshop.

The copy functions on the MX330 are relatively standard for a multi-function device: you can make up to 99 copies at once and easily adjust the contrast and magnification of a document from 25 per cent to 400 per cent, all directly through the settings on the LCD display.

The scanner gives you two options: either scan single photos and documents or a stack of documents using the automatic document feeder. You also have several choices in terms of where you want to send a scanned document, such as directly to a PC as a JPEG, TIFF, BMP or PDF file, or attached to an email, with the option to scan and convert to text using optical character recognition. All scanned files are placed into your custom 'my box' directory, which displays all scanned and imported images, as well as images recently saved onto the hard drive.

Performance
As you can tell from the benchmarks, the MX330 demonstrates only average speed across the board. It jumped ahead most noticeably in the colour-text speed test, producing 5.54 pages per minute. That means it ties with the more expensive HP Officejet J6480. On the other hand, the MX330 suffered in the photo speed test, producing just 0.93 pages per minute, just ahead of the J6480, which produced only 0.83 pages per minute. Since this isn't a full-blown photo printer, we can forgive the MX330 for dropping the ball on photo print speed, since the rest of the scores are at least average or faster than the competition.

We have several complaints about the MX330's output quality. We printed all photo and graphical documents on the paper that Canon provided and were still largely dissatisfied with the results. Black text appears satisfactorily darkened, but closer inspection reveals characters with jagged edges, fuzziness with small font sizes, and harsh contrasts in colour blends. In addition, our colour graphics prints came out grainy, with a dull hue marring the images. Luckily, our 76 by 127mm photo turned out okay, with sharper lines and an even saturation, but the skin tones in the portrait shots still couldn't shake the dreary palette.

Speed test (in pages per second)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Presentation speed

Photo speed (one sheet)

Colour graphics speed

Text speed

HP Officejet J6480

2.36 

0.83 

2.17 

5.54 

Canon Pixma MX330

2.17 

0.93 

1.88 

5.54 

Kodak ESP 5

2.21 

1.37 

2.13 

4.39 

Brother MFC-5890CN

2.75 

0.81 

2.37 

3.95 

Conclusion
The Canon Pixma MX330 will definitely satisfy those for whom low cost and robust features are more of an issue than output quality, but dedicated shooters should seek out a more capable machine to bring their photos to life.

Additional editing by Charles Kloet