The sunshine brings out an excellent printer deal from Canon
Regular readers of my reviews will probably know I’m not a huge fan of inkjet printers for business use. It’s the most expensive way to produce printed documents, even if the initial outlay is low.
However, recently I’ve seen a subtle shift, where the printer makers are going that extra mile to reduce per print cost and make these devices singularly more attractive.
The Canon Maxify MB5350 A4 Inkjet Printer was originally launched about ten months ago, but I’ve decided to review it now because what was a good offer got even better recently.
But before I talk about costs, this is an excellent printer that could easily grace an office in a small business or even at home. As these things go, it has a relatively small footprint of just 46.3cm wide and 39.4cm deep.
However, when you actually load either of the two 250-sheet bins, they telescope out by 7cm, and with the paper output tray fully deployed it’s another 15cm deeper.
Into this rather compact column, Canon has managed to squeeze a reasonably fast 600 x 1200dpi colour inkjet printer, a 1200dpi scanner, copying functions and regrettably a fax. No semaphore option is available at this time for those who prefer that historical means of communication.
The print system is Canon’s own FINE technology, and thankfully it's gone with a cartridge system that separates all the colours, as per CYMK. Two-sided printing is available, and the scanner has a 50-sheet document feeder that can do a single-pass doublesided scan. Impressively, the scanning can be to email, a network folder, the cloud or even an inserted USB stick.
As that statement suggests, the MB5350 is fully wi-fi networkable, and you can also attach it to a PC using USB or to wired network using Ethernet. When you consider that for some printers just adding Ethernet can cost half or more the price of this entire printer, that they just include all this functionality is great.
Normally, by this point in the review I’d have found fault, but the MB5350 almost defied my attempt to find any significant ones.
It’s fast, achieving 23ipm mono A4 and 14ipm colour A4. That first page pumps out in under nine seconds, or a few seconds longer if in sleep mode. All the functions are easy to access through a 7.5cm colour touchscreen that prompts you through each process with an interface that's easy to follow.
With the printer originally costing around £250, and now dropped to £50 on Ebuyer, the reasonable conclusion might be that Canon is about to sting you from another direction. But shockingly it's not, in this instance, because as inkjets go, the MB5350 has some of the largest physical cartridges that I’ve seen. They’re huge. And being so big they can, when Canon wants them too, hold plenty of ink.
The ‘PGI-2500XL’ variants of the cartridges each are rated for different numbers of pages at 5% coverage, but typically the black can produce 2,500, and the average yield on colour is 1,500 for each. The RRP cost of each cartridge is about £13, representing a cost per page of about 0.5p mono and 0.9p colour. However, you can buy a complete set of Canon-branded products for less than £40, with a little research. Those are great numbers and better than some laser printers I’ve reviewed.
And if that wasn’t fantastic enough, Canon also has two promotional deals that make the MB5350 even better value still. The first of these is that it's offering a three-year free warranty, should anything go wrong with it. That’s useful and probably worth about £40-50 if you covered it through a service. But it's also giving away 5,000 sheets of paper worth another £50 if you buy this printer and register for the promotion before 31st August 2015.
As value goes, I think you’d be hard pressed to beat this if you’re in the market for a nice inkjet printer/scanner/copier/fax. Mark Pickavance
A powerful office inkjet with tempting promotional offers.
Specifications
• Productive all-in-one for a busy small office with print, copy, scan and fax functions
• No waiting for documents with Quick First Print plus 15 colour pages/min and 23 mono pages/min
• Wi-fi plus Ethernet connection: print from and scan to PCs, smartphones, tablets and cloud services
• Integrated 50-sheet single pass 2-sided ADF and two 250-sheet paper cassettes
• Print up to 2,500 mono and 1,500 colour pages with individually replaceable XL ink tanks
• Create quality documents with dual resistant HD ink optimised for business printing
• Recommended monthly page volume of 250-1,500 pages
• Easy operation with large 7.5 cm colour touch display
• Free three-year warranty.
• A year's worth (5,000 sheets) of free paper