Canon Pixma MG4250 review

Canon's Pimxa MG4250 is a compact MFD designed for general and creative use in the home. Like other Pixmas it's a smart-looking device, but it doesn't have quite the quality feel of more expensive models in the range. There is less use of expensive, shiny black plastic, and the colour screen tilts up on a hinge that feels distinctly wobbly.

There's little evidence of cost-cutting elsewhere, however. It can print automatically on both sides of a sheet of paper. It's easy to connect and share it over a wireless network, and there are memory card slots and controls for making direct photo prints. While the scanner and printer aren't Canon's best, their mid-range specifications are good enough for all but the most demanding creative jobs.

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This MFD's printer takes one black ink cartridge and a single colour tank combining cyan, magenta and yellow. Tri-colour cartridges are somewhat out of fashion as the entire tank needs replacing when only one colour is exhausted, but high-capacity cartridges are available for the MG4250. Stick to these and it has reasonable running costs for such a cheap device.

The MG4250's printer got off to a quick start, delivering a page of black text just 11 seconds after we sent the print job. At its default quality it carried on swiftly, reaching almost eight pages per minute (ppm), but using the driver's Fast setting was barely any quicker. At less than 2ppm, colour prints were very slow, as were double-sided (duplex) jobs: here the MG4250 could print only slightly more than one double-sided page per minute.

Fortunately, photocopies and photo printing were all quite swift, as were scans at lower resolutions. More importantly, the quality of all of this was very high. Text was crisp and black, while colour graphics and photographs were detailed, with reasonably punchy colours. Scans were sharp and, like colour photocopies, had quite accurate colours.

Without a fax modem, this MFD isn't suited to all home offices, but it's a cheap, competent all-rounder that looks smart and is easy to use. It's the perfect choice for a home user on a budget.