Canon PIXMA MX885

Canon makes two ranges of Pixma multi-function printer-scanners: the MP range for photo enthusiasts and the MX range for home- and small-business customers.

The MX885, though it's aimed at office customers, actually straddles both groups, with memory card readers for direct printing of photos, as well as fax and a 35-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) for scanning and copying multi-page documents.

The rounded lines and high-gloss black finish follow Canon's recent designs and it's just as prone to gathering fingerprints as the others. Both the scanner and the printer can work with both sides of each sheet in a single job, so you can produce double-sided copies as well as prints.

The controls are unusual in that they appear to have no legends on them at first sight. In fact it turns out they show two completely different sets of legends that shine through the button tops depending on usage. One set of arrows is for navigating the menus on the 75mm colour screen and another shows number keys and is mainly for sending faxes.

The MX885 has two 150-sheet paper trays: a slide-in cassette at the front and a pull-up tray at the back. It doesn't have a CD/DVD tray as some of the MP range does, but it does retain the memory card slots for SD, Compactflash, Memory Stick and XD formats, and a USB slot for direct printing from cameras and USB memory keys. It can connect to a computer over USB or to a wired or wireless network.

Speed-wise, in our tests it managed at 9.6 pages per minute (ppm) for black text and 5.3ppm for colour pages, good speeds for an inkjet printer, though it did spend up to a minute housekeeping before the first print of the day.

The only real fault is the double-sided print speed – as with most Canons it's held back by the need to allow the ink to dry between sides of the same sheet. A 20-side print came out at just under 3ppm and a double-sided copy job of 10 sides took four minutes and 19 seconds.

Prints from this device were uniformly excellent: text was crisp and clean and colours were smooth, if a little less bright than from some rivals. A colour copy was close to the original in its colours, and colour scans are accurate and came out impressively detailed.

Photo prints were natural and showed plenty of detail and, although the printer only uses four ink colours, there is a separate ‘photo black' ink that improves printing of darker colours.

Overall, the Canon Pixma MX885 offers a lot for anybody who wants to print work documents and photos at home.