Canon Pixma MX320 Review June 27, 2011 11:03 by Matt Bird

Overview

This is a useful home office colour inkjet, which can also turn its jets to photos, with good effect. Having fax facilities, a neat Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) and the ability to print from and scan to USB drives are useful business extras. However, living with a single cartridge for all three colour inks is likely to be wasteful. Page print costs are also higher with this machine, even when printing black text, so you need to balance features against running costs, before making a buying decision.

Ratings

Canon Pixma MX320

Main Review

Canon's PIXMA MX320 is an inkjet all-in-one intended for small business, rather than the home photo enthusiasts; the MP range is aimed at photographers. It forsakes the paper cassette of, for example, the MP540, in favour of an Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) and the photo card readers for fax facilities. It doesn't have a colour LCD display, either, but relies on a 2-line by 16-character text-based LCD, for simple status messages. It does have a number pad for fax dialling, though, and a front-panel USB socket, so you can print files from a USB drive and save scans onto one, which is probably more useful in a small office. The single paper-feed tray hinges up from the back and can take up to 150 sheets of paper, or photo blanks. They feed to a tray at the front, formed by the inside of the front cover, which folds down. Cleverly, Canon has arranged that this covers spring open automatically, if you forget to open it before you start printing. At the back are sockets for USB, a phone line and an optional phone handset, though there's no network socket, which is a little odd, given then many people now have home networks of two or more PCs. Canon quotes speeds of 7.5ppm and 4.5ppm for black and colour print, respectively, though under test we saw real-world speeds of 6.1ppm and 2.2ppm. The black speed is good and reasonably close to spec, but there's still some way for Canon to go to reach its colour claim. In comparison with other all-in-ones, though, these figures aren't at all bad. Print quality isn't everything it could be. Although black text is dense and black, there's some fuzziness, particularly around emboldened characters and there's some noticeable dithering in areas of solid colour. Photos, despite this being a business printer, are very good, certainly good enough for occasional use. The PIXMA MX320 uses two cartridges, one black and the other tri-colour and they’re available in two yields. Using the higher yield versions gives page costs of 4.7p for ISO black print and 11.5p for ISO colour. Comparing these with the figures of 3.1p and 8.8p from the MP540, you can see this machine is quite a bit more expensive to run. You should also take into account that unless you use all three colours at exactly the same rate, you’re very likely to have to replace the tri-colour cartridge before all three inks are spent. Overall, not a bad printer by any means, but without separate cartridges, printing costs will be higher and there is probably a better machine out there for your needs.