Canon Pixma MP620 review

Canon printers have held the all-in-one top spot on the A List for some time now, and the Pixma MP620 effortlessly demonstrates why. It’s a five-colour device with both pigmented and dye-based blacks for top quality results whether printing text or photos, and it adds 802.11bg Wi-Fi to the usual USB and Ethernet ports. In short, it will comfortably handle any kind of job thrown at it from anywhere in the house.

The bulky design is similar to previous models, with a flip-up control panel on top housing a 2.5in LCD with a scroll wheel for easy navigation.

Card slots sit behind a door at the front, while two different types of paper can be loaded at once into the main base cassette and the rear tray, both of which hold 150 sheets.

But it isn’t the design that impresses us most about Canon’s high-end all-in-ones. Time and time again we’ve put them up against the best that rivals can offer, and the quality of Canon’s prints consistently proves better.

The separate inks allow for superbly crisp text and solid colours in documents, while photo quality earned top marks in our tests. Excellent detail, sharp edges and vivid, accurate colours make it a great alternative to the photo lab.

It’s fast, too, printing that excellent text at 7.1ppm, and 3.4ppm for colour documents. Its 1min 25sec 6 x 4in photo is way down on the older, now-discontinued MP610, but it’s still lightning-quick compared to the efforts of most other brands.

Scanning and copying aren’t so fast, but times of 32 seconds for mono and 54 seconds in colour are still good, and the scanner produces results bettered only by recent HP models we’ve tested.

Sadly, it’s a little dearer to run than previous Canons, but at 8.3p per A4 page it won’t bankrupt you and the ability to replace inks one by one means it’s not wasteful.

There’s also no duplex module for easy two-sided printing, and you’ll have to adjust the unnecessary drying time in the driver settings to get the speeds we’ve achieved here.

But, these points aside, there simply aren’t many devices out there that can match the MP620’s combination of speed, quality and value for money. Canon’s A List reign continues.