PIXMA MP530 review

Canon's PIXMA MP530 is an inkjet multifunction peripheral that can scan, copy, print and even fax in colour.

Just like Dell's Multifunction Laser Printer 1815dn (reviewed opposite), it has an ADF and a duplexer, which means it can automatically print on both sides of a sheet of paper. However, using the duplex option reduces the quality of the text, as you can see from the print samples (below right).

The MP530 has two paper trays, which are useful for keeping stocks of different paper types ready to print. You can choose between them in the print driver, or by using one of the buttons on the front panel.

As with many other PIXMA products, setting up the MP530 involves first fitting its print heads, which is no more difficult than inserting its five ink cartridges. The printer's large black tank contains a pigment-based ink that is used mostly to print black text. The remaining four cartridges contain dye-based black, cyan, magenta and yellow inks that are used to print colour graphics and photos.

Though the MP530 prints photos with only four colours, it can print with tiny one-picolitre droplets of ink that create very small colour dots on the page, reducing the appearance of grain. This, coupled with a very high print resolution, helps it to produce sharp, detailed photos, with less grain than most other four-ink printers. The MP530 produced photos with more accurate colours than some other PIXMA printers we've reviewed, but we still prefer the results from the best six-ink printers. It has a PictBridge USB port, but no memory card slots.

The MP530 is quite a fast inkjet, producing crisp and acceptably dark draft text at 12 pages per minute (ppm). At the higher, Standard quality setting, it produced our formal letter test at 6.6ppm. As with most duplex printers, it was slower during double-sided printing, completing our Draft test at 4.3ppm. Though its performance on our colour Normal document was fast, it was fairly slow to complete our test photos.

We were impressed with the MP530's text printing, which was black and unusually sharp for an inkjet, even at fast speed settings. Its colour prints on plain paper were also crisp, but they suffered from a mild rose colour bias.

Colours were captured more faithfully by the MP530's scanner, which was also excellent at recording subtly different light and dark shades. It was quick to complete our timed tests, though the fast-moving scan head was loud during previews and low-resolution scans.

This multifunction's ADF makes multi-page copying easy. Given the performance of its printer and scanner, we weren't surprised that it also makes quick, high-quality copies. A mono copy of a 10-page document took just under three minutes, making this one of the quickest inkjets we've timed. Single copies took just 15 seconds in black only, and 29 seconds in colour.

The MP530 is a little expensive to buy, but its running costs are reasonable. It's a good choice if you need a competent all-rounder that can provide good results in both creative and office tasks.