Product Reviews

The MP620 is a new mid-range, all-in-one addition to Canon's Pixma range, with a specific focus on photo printing. It's well equipped for capturing your old prints using its scanner and, appropriately, it also features a variety of built-in card reader slots, as well as a PictBridge port.

The printer has a USB connection, but you can also connect it to your router using an Ethernet cable or to a wireless network using Canon's Mac-based utility to first configure it over USB. The process should take 10 to 15 minutes at most - it took an additional 10 minutes to remove all of the securing tape and fit the printhead and inks. Once that's all done, the software indicates the signal strength received in the printer's current location, so you can consider moving it to achieve a more stable, faster connection.

The MP620's case complements the aluminium iMac and, in a fortuitous stroke of luck for Canon, the latest Mac laptops, too. It's not just a quick attempt to match Apple's computers on a superficial level, as Canon has paid plenty of attention to practical considerations, too.

The printer's display folds down on top of an array of comfortably large buttons, and a neatly curved thumb hole raises it up. The screen is bright and text is clear, and perusing menu items is swift, thanks to the physical scroll wheel, rather than having to tap or hold buttons.

An even more delightful feature of this device - particularly in a networked environment where the printer is in another room - is that it automatically pops open its output tray rather than holding up jobs. The end of the tray won't fold outwards as well, but enough of an A4 sheet lies in the body that it won't spill out onto the floor. Capacity in the bottom input tray isn't huge, at 150 sheets, but it's sufficient for moderate use. Slots for memory cards are within easy reach behind a panel at the front-right corner,

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while the PictBridge connector is situated below.

Canon uses five separate ink cartridges in the MP620: separate cyan, magenta, yellow and black cartridges for colour prints, and a separate, higher-capacity black cartridge for mono. Individual colour tanks are £7.99 from Canon's online store, while the high-capacity black tank is £8.99.

When it comes to printing photographs, Canon's claim of 41 seconds for a 4in x 6in print proved highly accurate in our tests using the normal-quality setting. It also claims that this produces a photolab-quality borderless print, but we found that this setting had unpleasant colour reproduction of some tones.

In our bridal picture, skin tones tended towards an unhealthy orange tint, with a bloomy effect across the whole image that reduced contrast. Another picture of boats on a waterway had a very slight blue tinge in various places.

Increasing the print quality one notch to its highest setting produced far better results. Colours were darker - perhaps a little excessively in dark areas, but it retained detail and photos looked far more pleasant as a result, with healthier, more accurate skin tones, clearer detail on hair and a lack of the tinting that we noticed at lower-quality settings. The penalty is a printing time of one minute 26 seconds. Although that's more than double the time, it's still a comfortable duration and justifiable for the improvement that it brings.

Noise generated during these photo tests was pleasantly low, with the printer emitting only a gentle swoosh as the print head moved back and forth.

Text in our mono document test was crisp and showed no signs of spatter. There was only a small sign of misalignment on one line, although the printer includes the usual wealth of calibration and cleaning functions to fix this and other problems. Documents of this type, with a lower overall coverage, are fed through the printer more quickly and so generate a bit more noise, but it remains at an acceptable level. The scanner works up to 2400dpi and scanned an A4 page at 150dpi in just over eight seconds, 300dpi in 16 seconds and 600dpi in 51 seconds. The scanner is also very quiet and showed acceptable levels of paper grain and noise.

Overall, we're very impressed with the Canon Pixma MP620 due to a good blend of looks and practicality, easy setup for wireless printing and low noise levels. It also helps that print quality is excellent if you don't mind waiting a bit longer.