Canon Pixma MX330

Small office all-in-one inkjet without the photo frills

The whole scanner section also hinges up, so you can get at the device’s ink cartridges easily. There are two of these, one black and the other tri-colour and they’re easy to fit, though not as versatile as having separate cartridges for each colour.

Scanning to a USB drive is a handy option, but no memory card slots are included

Although there are no memory card sockets, there’s a PictBridge socket for camera connection and this doubles as a link for scanning jpegs of pages to USB drives. The same socket can also take an optional Bluetooth adapter, so you can print directly from mobiles and Bluetooth-equipped cameras. At the back are sockets for USB and a fax line.

Physical connection is easy and the supplied software bundle includes OCR software as well as document management applets for scanning and copying. Drivers are supplied for Windows 2000 through to Vista and for Mac OSX10.3.9 and above. Canon also provides separate drivers for Debian and ‘other’ Linux varieties, from the download pages of its site.

The Pixma MX330 has fairly modest print speeds with claims of 7.5ppm for black and 4.5ppm for colour. This is using the new ISO methodology for testing print speeds, a long overdue benchmark to curb the more outlandish claims of some manufacturers.

In our tests, the PIXMA MX330 printed a five-page, black text document in 59 seconds, giving a speed of just over 5ppm, but this climbed to 6.4ppm for a 20-page job. A five-page black text and colour graphics document took 2m14s, which is a speed of 2.2ppm, so we're still not hitting the published figures, even though they're supposed to include page rasterising as well as printing time, as ours do.

A single page colour copy from the flatbed glass took 44 seconds and a five-page black text document fed from the ADF in 1m17s. Both these times are very reasonable for an inkjet all-in-one at this price point. Although, as we've said, there's less emphasis on photo print in the MX series of machines, a 15 x 10cm photo print from a PC took 1m33s and from a PictBridge camera the time dropped to just 57 seconds.