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Canon Pixma MX525 review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £69
inc VAT

This low-cost MFP lacks duplex but has everything else you'll need in your home or small office

The Canon Pixma MX525 is a neatly designed low-cost inkjet MFP with a 30-page ADF and a 100 sheet paper tray. Neither print engine nor ADF is duplex, so you’re limited to single-sided scans and copies, but this is typical for an MFP at this price.

The MX525 has USB, Ethernet and Wi-Fi connections, and if you connect it to a network you can take advantage of Canon’s mobile printing apps for smartphones and tablets and integration with services such as Google Cloud Print for easy printing from anywhere with an internet connection. It also has a 6.2cm colour screen and navigation keys that make it easy to take advantage of all the MFP’s functions without connecting it to a PC.

Canon Pixma MX525

Unlike more expensive models in Canon’s Pixma MX MFP range, the MX525 doesn’t have self-contained paper input and output trays. The input tray is just a shelf with a slider on the right-hand side to keep paper aligned regardless of its width. This actually works well and none of our paper fed in askew. However, the output tray just above it is a flimsy affair. There’s no kind of lip to catch the paper, so each sheet just slipped off the output tray. This is inconvenient if you’re printing large documents; we initially ended up with 25 disarrayed pages in a pile on the floor. However, if you position the printer far enough back on a table to ensure that the leading edge of each page rests on that table, your documents will stay in order.

The MX525 uses a combined tri-colour ink cartridge. These are common in budget printers but have a number of disadvantages compared to individual ink cartridges. The biggest is that if one colour runs out, you have to replace the entire cartridge, rather than just being able to replace the ink you use most often.

Photo print quality from this kind of printer is also typically not as good as that of printers with a dedicated black cartridge, but Canon’s three dye-based inks actually don’t do too badly when it comes to photos. Colours are a little over-saturated and contrast is limited but dark areas are surprisingly rich and pale skin tones look warm. Prints also looked sharp and pleasingly glossy on Canon’s own-brand photo paper.

Canon Pixma MX525

Although tri-colour cartridges have a reputation for being expensive, Canon’s XL cartridges are surprisingly good value, with black and colour ink tanks giving you 600 mono and 400 colour pages respectively. This works out at 2.7p per mono page, which is about what we expect for an inkjet, and a total of 7.5p for a page of mixed black and colour printing. That makes this one of the cheaper budget MFPs currently available to run.

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Basic Specifications

Rating****
Maximum native print resolution4,800×1,200dpi
Max optical resolution1,200×2,400dpi
Output bit depth24-bit

Quoted Speeds

Quoted speed, mono A410ppm
Quoted speed, colour A46ppm

Tested Print Speeds

Time for two 10x8in photos 1.07m 8s
Time for six 6x4in photos 1.06m 27s

Physical and Environmental

Standard printer interfacesUSB, 802.11n wireless
Optional printer interfaces£78
Size200x458x285mm
Weight8.7kg
Noise (in normal use)42.5dB(A)

Paper Handling

Maximum paper sizeA4
Maximum paper weight300gsm
Standard paper inputs1
Standard paper input capacity100
Maximum paper inputs1
Maximum paper input capacity100
Duplex (code, cost if option)Yes

General

Printer technologythermal inkjet
Supported operating systemsWindows XP/Vista/7/8, Mac OS X 10.6.8+
Other inkjet features6.2cm colour screen, cloud printing
Other inkjet optionsnone

Buying Information

Price£69
Consumable parts and prices£19
Price per colour A4 page4.7p
Quoted life of supplied black cartridge180 (ISO/IEC 24734)
Quoted life of supplied colour cartridge(s)180 (ISO/IEC 24734)
Quoted life of supplied photo cartridge(s)69 (ISO/IEC 29102)
Warrantyone year RTB
Supplierhttp://direct.tesco.com
Detailswww.canon.co.uk

Print Quality

Number of ink colours4
Number of ink cartridges2
Maximum number of ink colours4
Maximum number of cartridges2
Quoted photo durability30 years
Quoted photo durability sourceCanon

Tested Scan Speeds

Full scan area preview7s
A4 document at 150dpi19s
A4 document at 300dpi59s
6x4in photo at 600dpi1m 3s
6x4in photo at 1200dpi4m 38s

Tested Copy Speeds

Time for single A4 mono copy 1.015s
Time for single A4 colour copy 1.034s
Time for 10 A4 copies using feeder 2.02m 32s

Photo Features

PictBridge supportYes
Borderless printingup to A4
Direct (PC-less) printingYes
Supported memory cardsnone
CD printingNo

Copy Features

Maximum number of copies99

Fax Features

Max mono fax resolution300x300dpi
Fax memory (maximum mono pages)50