Canon Pixma MX525 review

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.

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.

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.

Print quality is excellent. Standard-quality mono text is as sharp as anything we’ve seen from a laser printer and even draft text looks better than many printers’ standard-quality prints, with only the faintest hint of a wobbly edge on some letters. However, given that draft text prints at 8.5ppm and standard text at 8ppm, you’re best off sticking with the sharp perfection of standard-quality printing. Our colour document looked fantastic, too. We saw lines on large images, but this was only visible on very close examination. Colours were accurate, shading was smooth, and fine 8pt text was clear, with only faint imperfections on some curved characters. Colour prints emerged a little slowly, at 2.2ppm, but this isn’t markedly sluggish by inkjet standards.

Photocopies took 15 seconds for a mono reproduction from the platen and 34 seconds for colour. Our colour photocopy looked great, with sharp text and accurate colour reproduction, but we noticed some grey lines on our mono photocopy. Apart from the 19s 150dpi A4 scan, scan speeds are a little slow, with a 300dpi scan of the same document coming in at 59s and a 600dpi photo scan at just over a minute.

Scan quality is better than that of most CIS scanners you’ll find built into an MFP, with plenty of smooth shading and sharper-than-average reproduction of areas of fine detail. It’s not perfect: some dark tones blend into each other and become indistinguishable and small text at 150dpi is a little fuzzy around the edges, but 300dpi document scans are perfect for archiving important correspondence and invoices. The scanner interface is to Canon’s usual high standard, with options that’ll keep both basic and advanced users happy.

With good print quality, plenty of connectivity options and surprisingly low running costs, this low-cost MFP isn’t perfect, but it’s a great Budget Buy.