Canon MAXIFY MB5350 review

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.

^ 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.

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

^ 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.

^ 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.