Canon Pixma MG4000 printers are the middle rung of its home and SOHO multifunction range. They generally offer better performance and are quite heavy duty machines used for mid-volume printing and scanning.
The Pixma MG4250 is the follow-up to the MG4150 from early 2012, and aside from the design of the chassis, this model having a matt-black finish as opposed to the glossy piano black of its predecessor, there's really very little difference between the pair.
This is a print, copy and scan device with wi-fi and USB connectivity, Apple AirPrint, Pixma Cloud print and Google Cloud Print support, as well as a memory card reader and automatic duplex printing.
The design is very robust and features some neat extras to help tantalise the consumer. For one, there's a full colour 62mm LCD located in the top corner, which can flip up and display the relevant printer menus and controls, as well as a preview of the contents of the memory card - although for some reason, we couldn't get this feature to work. Below the LCD are an array of control buttons to navigate through the menus, increase the number of copies, select colour or mono prints and copies and cancel any jobs, among other things.
The input tray can handle up to a hundred sheets and is fed through the front pull-down panel. This too is remarkably well built and feels like it has been manufactured to a much higher standard than some of the other printers we've already looked at.
Our full text page test measured the printing speed at around 8.5 pages per minute, with the colour taking longer at two pages per minute. Although it's not the fastest printer, the quality of both the standard text page and colour were excellent. The text stood out, with visibly sharper lines and edges to the lettering, and the colours were deeper, richer and far clearer than anything else so far.
The standard black and tricolour cartridges offer 180 pages each, with the option for high-yield versions to be fitted that can take those numbers up to 600 pages for the black and 400 pages for the colour. In terms of cost per page, the standard black cartridge costing £10.72 from Amazon will set you back roughly 6p per page. The standard colour cartridge, priced at £13.46 from Amazon, comes to 7p per page.
The Canon Pixma MG4250 may not be the fastest printer on test, but it has by far the best quality print. It costs toward the upper end of the group limit, at £49.99, although we have seen some examples going for around a fiver cheaper.
Al in all, this is a great home and office printer, and its build quality is second to none. Running costs are reasonably cheap, although we still have a problem with the tri-colour cartridges, which seems to be the norm these days.