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Canon MAXIFY MB5350 review

Front side view, Maxify MB5350
Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £180
inc VAT

The MB5350 is the most convincing MAXIFY we've reviewed, but it's still not quite a winner

Despite some strengths, we’re yet to find a Canon MAXIFY office inkjet that we’d choose over the equivalent Epson Workforce or WorkForce Pro – but perhaps the flagship MB5350 is an exception. Despite a very reasonable price, it’s stuffed full of useful features: there are two 250-sheet paper trays, wired and wireless networking, a colour touchscreen, and duplex printing, scanning, faxing and copying.

With two paper trays in the base, the MB5350 is taller than many inkjet MFPs, but it’s still better looking than most. At the top there’s a modest touchscreen, accompanied by a few dedicated function buttons and status lights. We’ve encountered a few disappointing control panels on recent Canon printers, and the MB5350 is no exception. The screen isn’t perfectly responsive, and transitions between menu items are often needlessly slow due to chuggy fade effects and animations.

Web admin screenshot showing ink level information, Maxify MB5350

^ The web interface is missing some advanced network and administrative features

The main menu includes a prominent Cloud option, behind which lies support for services such as Dropbox, Google Drive and Evernote. However, the printer couldn’t communicate with Canon’s servers for a couple of days near the start of our test, and once it could the Cloud submenu remained prone to lag. Despite this, cloud support is quite impressive: you can either scan to or print from files stored online, for example.

View of the default print driver settings, Maxify MB5350

^ The print driver’s quick setup tab covers typical print requirements

Screenshot of more detailed print driver settings, showing that there's no draft quality available, Maxify MB5350

^ Where we’re going we don’t need draft print quality

This MFP arrives with a generous 1,000-page black cartridge and colour tanks good for 700 pages each. When these are exhausted you can replace them with a 2,500-sheet black tank and colour supplies averaging 1,500 pages each, for a cost per mixed text and graphics page of 3.6p. That’s pretty good but the 0.7p per page black component of this is particularly impressive.

In some respects the MB5350 is remarkably quick. It delivered our 25-page mono letter test at a cracking 20.3 pages per minute (ppm), and needed just 51 seconds to copy a 10-page document in black only. Scans were also quite swift, with a 300dpi A4 scan completing in 14 seconds, but capturing a 6×4″ photo at 1,200dpi took 76 seconds, which is less competitive.

Colour printing was much less impressive. The MB5350 managed only 6.2ppm on our 24-page graphics test, and needed a minute and 49 seconds to copy a 10-page document in colour. We wouldn’t mind so much, but these prints and copies suffered from de-saturated, dull colours, leaving graphics looking ashen and presentations lacking impact. Pages felt noticeably damp after printing, and there was a small amount of bleed-through in duplexed graphics – at nearly four minutes for 10 sides of colour graphics, duplex printing was slow. Despite generally excellent scans, the auto-exposure didn’t work as well as we’d expect, leaving our office document’s white background a little blueish.

Screenshot of the TWAIN scan interface, Maxify MB5350

^ Canon’s TWAIN scanning interface is one of the best. Here we’re using the advanced mode

The MB5350 has plenty to recommend it, particularly if you don’t plan to print lots of colour pages. Overall, however, it misses the mark compared to the best of the opposition. We’d pay another £25 or so for Epson’s WorkForce Pro WF-5620DWF, which has it matched or beaten in most regards.

And neither of those suits your needs then check out our regularly-updated Best printer 2015 – Our inkjet, laser and MFP top picks

Hardware
TechnologyThermal inkjet
Maximum print resolution600×1,200dpi
Maximum optical scan resolution (output bit depth)1,200×1,200dpi (24-bit)
Number of colours (cartridges)4 (4)
Maximum number of colours (cartridges)4 (4)
Quoted photo durability (source)Not stated
Standard interfacesUSB, USB host, Ethernet, 802.11b/g/n wireless
Optional interfacesNone
Dimensions (HxWxD)351x463x394mm
Weight13.1kg
Duty cycle (pages per month)30,000 maximum, 250-1,500 recommended
Paper handling
Maximum paper sizeA4/legal
Maximum paper weight275gsm
Standard paper trays (capacity)2 (500)
Maximum paper trays (capacity)2 (500)
DuplexYes
Automatic Document Feeder capacity50
Photo features
Borderless printingNo
Direct (PC-less) printingUSB
Memory card supportNone
Supported operating systemsWindows XP or later, Mac OS X 10.6.8 or later, Android, iOS, Windows RT
Other features7.5cm colour touchscreen
Buying information
WarrantyOne year onsite (three-year upgrade applies before 31/08/15)
Price£180 inc VAT
Consumable parts and pricesPGI-2500XL black 2,500 pages (ISO/IEC 24712) £19. PGI-2500XL cyan 1,744 pages (ISO/IEC 24712), PGI-2500XL magenta 1,295 pages (ISO/IEC 24712), PGI-2500XL yellow 1,520 pages (ISO/IEC 24712), £14 each.
Quoted life of supplied black cartridge(s)1,000 pages (ISO/IEC 24712)
Quoted life of supplied colour cartridge(s)700 pages each (ISO/IEC 24712)
Cost per ISO/IEC 24712 A4 page inc VAT3.6p
Cost per ISO/IEC 24712 A4 page inc VAT (colour part)2.8p
Cost per ISO/IEC 24712 A4 page inc VAT (mono part)0.7p
Supplierwww.printerland.co.uk
Detailswww.canon.co.uk
Part code9492B008AA