A do-it all printer/scanner for the home
Manufacturers don’t make money from basic inkjet printers these days. Plenty in ink, but not the actual printers. Piling on more features is one way manufacturers try to stop the price falling so low that they’re actually paying you. So here’s the PIXMA MX495, another multifunction printer (MFP) that can print, scan, copy, and send/receive faxes.
You remember faxes. They were quicker than the post. Nowadays, you could probably get an Amazon delivery faster than a long fax. But still, the feature is there – if you keep your printer beside a phone socket. The 20-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) does make faxing, copying and scanning lengthy documents less hassle. If you want to print both sides of the paper (duplex), though, you will have to feed it manually.
The MX495 isn’t pretty, but it’s a great bit of compact design. The A4 printer and scanner squat neatly below a hefty lid that incorporates the ADF trays. The control panel is nothing to write home about. The LCD screen isn’t backlit, making it hard to see in dim light, and the menu requires more button presses than you’d expect. The control panel can be opened to deal with paper jams.
Five A4 pages of black text took a leisurely 45 seconds to print, while a 20-page document was churned out at 7.5 pages per minute (ppm). Despite using a USB cable rather than the built-in Wi-Fi, five basic colour pages of text and graphics took nearly three minutes (with long pauses). Photocopies were slow, too: a single mono page took 24 seconds, colour twice that. Using the ADF 10 mono copies took two minutes 44 seconds, but in colour the same job took 7.5 minutes.
Scanning was very quick, though, at just 12 seconds for an A4 page at 150 dots per inch (dpi), the same level of detail as a basic fax. A postcard-sized photo at 1200dpi took 57 seconds, which is also fast. The results were excellent, sharply focused with accurate colours. Copies look unusually good, too, and general print quality is more than enough for everyday plain-paper jobs.
Using the larger ink cartridges available, an A4 page of text and graphics works out at 7.5p. This is very competitive for a budget device, but at 3.1p the mono component is unusually pricey, so other models will work out slightly cheaper if you mainly print text. Overall, though, for its capabilities the MX495 is a bit of a bargain.
VERDICT
It may be inexplicably slow, but for under £50 this is a surprisingly effective multifunction printer, though you may have reservations if you tend to print a lot of mono pages.
SPECIFICATIONS
4800x1200dpi maximum print resolution • 8.8ppm quoted speed (mono) • 4.4ppm quoted speed (colour) • 600x1200dpi maximum scan resolution • 300x300dpi maximum fax resolution • USB • 802.11n Wi-Fi • 89x435x295mm (HxWxD) • 5.9kg