Canon Pixma MP450 review: Canon Pixma MP450

Intro
The Pixma MP450 all-in-one printer resides in the middle of Canon's multifunction printer line. Unlike Canon's more expensive office all-in-ones, the $129 MP450 is designed for home users. It offers neither fax nor networking capabilities, but its various functions let you print, scan, copy, and print photos from a memory card or a PictBridge camera without your PC. It's a basic printer, with only one paper feeder and no duplexer. If you want multiple paper sources (for different types of paper, for example) and autoduplexing, check out the next step up in the Canon line, the $179 Pixma MP500, which also features a larger LCD. For its price, however, the MP450 score points for its excellent print quality, fast print speeds--copying is a bit slow, however--and its small footprint. For about the same price, the HP PSC 2335 and the Lexmark P6250 offer roughly the same features but poorer performance and print quality. If you need a basic yet versatile home printer that doesn't take up a lot of desk space, we recommend the Canon Pixma MP450. The Canon Pixma MP450 is reasonably compact for a home all-in-one. With its input and output trays folded in, it measures 17.5 inches wide by 12.2 inches deep by 6.3 inches tall. It weighs a light 13.6 pounds--considerably lighter than the 21-pound Pixma MP500. The paper input tray and support panel sit vertically in the back. The output tray is simply the folded-out front wall of the printer. Unfortunately, it lacks an extension to keep long paper under control. Hidden in the depths of the output tray is a lever that you can switch to adjust the printer according to the thickness of the media you're using: for most types of paper, keep the lever to the left, but for envelopes and T-shirt transfers, shift it to the right.

The media card reader is hidden behind a door and accepts most common card types. You'll need an adapter for the xD-Picture card, MiniSD card, and Memory Stick Duo and Memory Stick Duo Pro cards. A PictBridge USB port on the front allows you to print straight from PictBridge-enabled cameras and camera phones, while the IrDA port lets you print wirelessly from infrared-enabled camera phones. You can also purchase an optional Bluetooth adapter to use with the USB port, which will let you print from Bluetooth devices. The flatbed scanner can scan originals up to 8.5 inches by 11.75 inches--roughly the measurements of A4 paper. The lid lifts to accommodate thicker originals up to 0.75 inch.

The control panel is fairly basic for an all-in-one printer. You can adjust the angle of the 1.9-inch color LCD according to your viewing conditions, and although it's small, it's easily readable. The panel has buttons for toggling between tasks, navigating the menu, and printing a photo index sheet. Two start buttons (one for black-ink only and one for color), a stop/reset button, and an on/off button round out the control panel. The menu is easy to navigate, and your options are represented in both text and graphics.

The Canon Pixma MP450 uses four-color ink: one black tank and one tricolor tank (it ships with the high-capacity tanks). You can access the tanks by lifting up on the control panel; a plastic support bar flips down to support the lid, much like a piano lid or a car hood. The tanks are a cinch to replace. The high-capacity black tank costs $29.99 and the high-capacity tricolor tank costs $34.99. Canon estimates the cost per page for this printer to be about 4 cents for a page of black text and 11 cents for a page of color graphics. For comparison, the Pixma MP500 offers more ink flexibility: three separate dye-based color ink tanks, a black dye-based ink tank, and a black pigment-based ink tank.

This printer has the normal range of options for one in its price range. When copying, you can reduce and enlarge, make borderless copies and borderless color prints, create stickers, and repeat an image multiple times on a single sheet of paper. With the media card reader, you can print individual photos from the card, or print an entire index sheet. By marking the appropriate bubbles on the index sheet and placing the sheet on a scanner, you can print multiple photos of your choice in one fell swoop. You can also print borderless photos on this printer. You can initiate scans from the printer's control panel, which allows you to save the results to your PC, save it as a PDF, attach it to an e-mail, or open it on your PC. Alternatively, you can start scans using the bundled MP Navigator software, which includes Easy-PhotoPrint for printing photos, ArcSoft PhotoStudio for editing photos, and ScanSoft OmniPage SE, which uses optical character recognition to convert a scanned document to text. You can also scan from any TWAIN- or WIA-compliant application.

The Canon Pixma MP450 fared well on our tests, keeping up with the Pixma MP500 in nearly every test but copying. It printed black text at a quick 6.78 pages per minute (ppm) and an 8x10 photo at a rate of 0.58ppm; it scanned a grayscale document at 5.19ppm and a color scan at 4.88ppm. All those numbers were right in line with the numbers for the MP500. Copying was a different story: the MP450 copied at a pokey 2.41ppm, while the MP500 nearly doubled that rate, with a score of 4.25ppm.

As for quality, on coated inkjet paper, the MP450's black text was fairly sharp and nicely dark. Upon close inspection, we noticed slight jagginess, but nothing too distracting, and the text was legible down to very small point sizes. In our color graphics page, the MP450 performed quite well, with bright, saturated colors, sharp edges, and a nice progression through grayscale and color gradients. The color photograph was nicely rendered, too, though the colors appeared a bit washed-out. Both color and grayscale scans showed good detail, though the dark end of the grayscale showed compression. In comparing photo prints between the MP500 and the MP450, we didn't see a noticeable difference, which is impressive considering the MP500's higher-end ink handling.

Canon provides a one-year limited warranty for the MP450 all-in-one, as well as a year of free, toll-free phone support, Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 8p.m., and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. ET. You can extend the warranty to three years for $95. You can also get tech support via e-mail, and Canon says it will respond within 24 hours. Canon's site has FAQs, a troubleshooting tool, downloadable drivers and software, and PDFs of product and software manuals.