Product Reviews

Who says practical devices have to be plain Janes? Not Canon. Clad in a mixture of matt and glossy blue plastic, its latest budget printer, scanner and copier combo is designed to cut a dash. There's only one problem: we're not sure the design works.

The SmartBase MP360's paper output tray folds up when not in use, displaying its shiny underside. To lower it, you have to press a button - a rather unnecessary step, but it looks cool as it's coming down. The paper input tray similarly folds away, but due to the positioning of the scanner unit so high up the body, you can't actually see the input tray without leaning over the back. This makes it very awkward to adjust the paper guide when swapping paper sizes.

The SmartBase MP360 comes with Canon's MP Toolbox software, which controls printing, scanning and copying. You get a generous software bundle, including ArcSoft PhotoStudio, OmniPage's

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optical character recognition package, as well as Easy-PhotoPrint and Easy-WebPrint. Thoughtfully, Canon lets you choose which of these you want to install.

Any reservations we have about the SmartBase MP360 are largely made up for in the most important area - print quality. Output for both text and graphics is excellent, even on plain paper. Text is crisp, while both photos and line graphics are sharp, with vibrant but not over-saturated colours. If we have acriticism, it's that colour output looks quite 'speckly' on plain paper. However, print quality on glossy paper is outstanding - especially for such a low-cost device. Photo output was among the best we've seen from any inkjet printer, let alone a budget multifunction device.

But achieving such high print quality usually has a downside and, in this case, it's speed. At Normal quality, the SmartBase MP360 could only crank out four pages a minute (ppm). This doubled this to 8ppm in Draft mode, but this is still way short of the quoted maximum of 18ppm.

Scanning is impressive. Images were clear and both colour and detail reproduced accurately, even in areas of dense shading. Impressively, the MP360 took only 39 seconds to scan an A4 photo at the Internet standard of 300dpi.

It's hard not to be impressed by the SmartBase MP360 - especially at this price. It performs very well and is excellent value for money. It's just a shame that it's not a bit faster. And Canon could do with a few aesthetic tips...