Canon PIXMA MG3250 review – Still a great budget buy

You might not expect to find a cheap inkjet MFP with wireless networking, but these days you can choose from several around the £50 mark, with this Canon PIXMA MG3250 available now for only £40 from Argos. The MG3250 is last year’s model, but things don’t move that quickly in the world of printers now.

It’s rather smart-looking, but it’s not especially highly specified, with only modest print speeds and scan resolutions. Its controls are fairly basic too, with no colour screen or memory card slots, suggesting that its Wi-Fi support comes at the expense of other useful features.

The Pixma MG3250’s single paper input tray is an unusual design that combines a 100-sheet input capacity with an extended area that catches printed pages as they spill over the short output flap. It sounds rudimentary, but works very well and allows the trays to fold up into the printer when not in use. It’s worth noting that the Pixma MG3250 also supports duplex (double-sided) printing, which is pretty good considering its price.

Canon has managed to pack quite a few copier functions into the MG3250’s push-button controls, which allow you to set up to 20 copies at a time, choose between A4 documents and A4 or 6x4in photos and even resize originals to fit the output size.

If your router doesn’t have WPS, use a temporary USB connection to join the MG3250 to a wireless network

As there’s no screen, this printer must be joined to a wireless network using WPS or a USB connection during setup. It’s a straightforward job, but once we’d installed the software we weren’t too impressed with the printer’s wireless performance. During our first round of print tests it was prone to pausing mid-job with the Wi-Fi indicator light flashing. We restarted our network router and the printer, after which its performance seemed to improve.