Labs

Canon's PIXMA MP220 has only a two-line mono LCD text display, but is otherwise fairly well endowed with features, providing memory card slots and a PictBridge port so you can print direct from your camera or media without going through a PC. Build quality isn't quite as solid as we've come to expect from Canon, though, and we found it difficult to load paper correctly into the single rear tray to allow it to feed properly. The MP220's scanner was also very noisy in use, emitting a harsh whine as the scanner head moved repeatedly across the page.

However, the MP220

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proved to be a good all-rounder, despite these minor irritations. Draft prints were reasonably quick at one minute and nine seconds for ten pages, and the resulting text quality was good enough for all but the most formal of uses. Our correspondence-quality text prints looked even better, and still took less than a minute and a half for ten pages. The quality of our mixed colour documents didn't disappoint either, with solid shading and precise colour. Sharp 6x4in photos printed at a reasonable rate and showed only a slight trace of grain, with an end result that was good enough to frame, despite a very faint over-emphasis on yellow tones.

Canon's scanner software is excellent, and our scans were sharp and detailed, even at low resolution settings. At higher resolutions, subtle details of colour and shading were captured with great accuracy.

Although Canon's more expensive printers, including the MP520 reviewed here, use separate inks, the MP220 uses just black and a single tri-colour cartridge. This helps to push its mixed colour print costs up to a pretty steep 7.8p per page, which compares poorly with the similarly priced Lexmark X4550.