Canon Pixma MG5350 review

Canon’s 2011 Pixma all-in-one refresh sees five new models arrive, but it’s the one in the middle that caught our eye. The MG5350 lacks the six-ink print engine of the dearer MG6250, and the film scanner of the tank-like top-end MG8250, but for most home users it strikes the perfect balance between quality and affordability.

It’s all gloss-black, with 150-sheet input trays at the front and rear, and an automatic-opening output tray. It has USB 2 and Wi-Fi connectivity, a PictBridge port and a media card reader, plus a tray for printing to CDs. The MG5350 is high enough up the scale to include a 3in TFT, with three buttons beneath it with which to navigate the large icon-led menu system. You don’t get the half-button, half-touch interface of the dearer models, but it’s simple enough to control for copies and scans.

Within the menus are a few neat inclusions. Cloud printing is now available, so you can browse and print images from either a Picasa account or Canon’s own Image Gateway, directly on the printer’s screen. The printer has a range of paper templates stored, so you can print your own tablature or graph paper, for example. And there’s a quiet mode that really works – it more than halves the print speed, but eliminates the most annoying high-pitched noises.

That print engine is barely altered from last year, and it’s the same as in the standalone iP4950, which means print speeds of 11.3ppm in mono and 6.1ppm in colour. A 6 x 4in photo at top quality arrived in 47 seconds, and A4 in 1min 38secs. The separate dye-based and pigmented black inks mean text is thick and solid, while photos have all of the punch, contrast and detail we’ve come to expect. HP’s OfficeJets are better with documents, but there still isn’t a better choice than a Pixma for home photo printing.

The good news is that the scanner, previously the weakest element of Canon’s range, is actually rather impressive. Our test photo at 300ppi was sharp and packed with detail, with only the brightest colours bleaching out slightly. Text was perfectly captured, even at 150ppi, and it picked up the ultrathin lines on our test graph, which many all-in-ones struggle with.

The MG5350 uses the same five inks as much of the Pixma range, and with each available from Amazon for around £9 inc VAT, prints work out at around 3p for mono and 8.4p for colour. A 6 x 4in photo will cost around 15.6p before paper costs. There are certainly plenty of cheaper printers, so be aware you are paying for that quality. Keen photographers may want to step up the £180 MG6250, which adds an extra grey ink for superior monochrome prints.

But for most people the MG5350 is all the printer they’ll ever need. It’s reasonably priced at £129, offers superb photos and good document quality, and all at speeds few inkjet devices can hope to match. If you won’t regularly print photos it’s perhaps overkill given the running costs, but if you want the best of both worlds you simply won’t find a better all-round inkjet than this.

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