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.

It didn’t remain problem-free, however. We experienced slower scan times than we’d expect over our wireless network, and tried to improve performance by moving the MFP to with a couple of metres and with a direct line of sight to the router. We were able to cut the time of a 150dpi A4 scan from 33 to 17 seconds, but when repeated over a USB connection the same job took just 12 seconds.

The print driver’s default screen offers a choice of presets and options

This is an unhurried printer, not quite able to break the 10ppm barrier even when printing text in its Fast print mode. At 1.6ppm, colour prints on plain paper were rather slow using Normal print quality, while photo prints were even more so; at the highest quality, each 6x4in borderless snap took nearly three minutes. Fortunately the results were worth waiting for, with strong black text and blemish-free colour on plain paper, and sharp, detailed photos on glossy media. Scans weren’t the sharpest we’ve seen from a Canon device, but documents were crisp enough, while colours captured from photos were accurate and subtle shade details were preserved well.

Even scanners with LED light sources need a moment to get ready

The MG3250 accepts Canon’s PG-540 black and CL-541 colour cartridges, both of which are available in high-capacity versions. Using these keeps print costs down to a total of 6.5p per page of mixed text and graphics, which is very competitive for such a cheap device. If you can live with its leisurely speeds, the MG3250 is otherwise a great cheap MFP. It’s our Budget Buy for those who need a wireless device.