Canon PIXMA MX330 multifunction device

While the PIXMA MX range of printer/scanners can be used to print photos, it's also useful for those who work from home or run a small office.

The PIXMA MX330 sits in the middle of the range and at under £115 is more affordable than several similar rivals.

The white top of the machine contains an automatic document feeder (ADF), which Canon has neatly designed so that when it’s closed there are no ugly trays sticking out. The control panel is built into the black surrounding of the ADF, too, giving the machine a neat, integrated appearance.

There's a 45mm colour screen set in the centre of the panel but as it’s so small it's more useful for negotiating the menus than for previewing photos. There are buttons for copying, fax and scanning and others to start and stop the current job.

An input tray folds up from the back of the machine and paper feeds through to another tray, formed when the front cover is folded down. If you forget to open it, it folds down automatically before printing starts. There are no memory card slots in the PIXMA MX330, but a single USB connector allows connection of both Pictbridge-compatible cameras and USB memory keys.

Canon’s standard software, which includes an OCR facility, is supplied on CD and the driver includes standard features such as putting multiple pages on one sheet and resizing pages to fit the paper.

Print speeds, while not up to the manufacturer's claims, were pretty good for a multifunction device, and in our tests we recorded 6.4 pages per minute (ppm) for black text and 2.2ppm for colour prints. Print quality was good on both plain and photo papers and the two ink cartridges, one black and the other comprising three colours, produced excellent photo images.

It also produced good text and business graphics, while photocopies were decent if lighter than their originals, which applied to scanned images, too.

The two cartridges, if you buy the high-capacity versions, give per-page costs of 3.7p for black and 8.8p for colour, both of which are on the high side.