Canon Pixma MP510 review

The Pixma MP510 is a hulking beast, but don't let that put you off.

It's not what you'd call ugly, despite its size, and once you flip up the control panel to reveal an array of buttons and a 1.9-inch screen you'll soon forget what it looks like. It's a wonderful device to use in every way.

Four cartridges are used for printing: one pigment-based black for top text quality, and three dye-based colours for photos. Our document tests showed remarkably bold and sharp text, with no visible spidering or rough edges, while colour presentations were accurately reproduced, without banding. Text appeared at a decent 6.9 pages per minute in normal quality, while draft mode raised that to nearly 10ppm with only a slight fuzziness. But it's the MP510's photo printing that proved the biggest draw, with a lot of detail and accurately reproduced colours at incredible speeds. It whipped out our six 6x4-inch test photos at best quality in just seven minutes and 41 seconds, which works out at around a minute and a quarter each; this is not far off the speed of the best dedicated photo inkjets. We'd have to say it's not quite capable of producing prints to match last month's Pixma iP5300, but for an all-in-one we were delighted with the quality.

The scanner offers a high optical resolution of up to 1,200x 4,800 points per inch, but the final images in our tests were slightly out of focus. It's not a huge issue, and for most documents and photos you may not notice, but it may miss details that a good dedicated scanner would capture.

If you primarily print but like the idea of scanning and copying when necessary, this is fine, and the scanner works very quickly indeed. Copying is also very fast: a single A4 mono copy took 15 seconds, or 37 seconds for colour.

There's a PictBridge port and card slots for most memory formats except xD-Picture, and you get some useful Canon software as well as an OCR utility to read text from scanned documents. For just £75, it's one of the best multifunction devices we've seen.