Canon Pixma MP630 all-in-one printer

Pocket-lint

By Chris Brennan

Published Aug 18, 2009

The MP630 sits towards the top end of Canon's Pixma range of all-in-one devices. It's got an impressive feature set though at £170 that's to be expected.

The Canon has five separate ink tanks with the standard CMYK plus a photo black pigment based ink to provide better photographs. On top of this the MP630 has automatic duplexing to allow you to print on both sides of a sheet of paper. A memory card reader is included and can read the most popular, and some obscure formats.

The printer can output t 9600 x 2400 dpi and the scanner captures images at 4800 x 9600dpi. There are two paper trays both with a capacity of 150 sheets so you can keep plain A4 in one and photo paper in the other should you wish. There's also a CD/DVD printing attachment supplied with the Canon to create your own media designs. The main controls are kept under a flap on the top of the Canon. Here you'll find the 6.3cm LCD screen and main operation controls.

The MP630 is USB only when it comes to connectivity options and we're surprised there's no Wi-Fi or Ethernet. For the price we'd have liked to see at least a wireless option.

At £7.99 each for the four standard tanks the inks are decent value, the photo black is £8.99. That's £41 to replace all the ink, which is pretty good. Canon quotes the life of each tank in pages for mixed text and graphics as: Pigment black 350, Black 1875, Cyan 505, Magenta 471, Yellow 505. For photographs the estimates are given for a 6 x 4in shot as follows: Pigment black 3160, Black 665, Cyan 205, Magenta 206, Yellow 211.

The photo quality of the MP630 really is outstanding as well as nippy. An A4 shot at the highest quality setting took just 1 minute and 57 seconds. The print was superb with punchy and accurate colours and fantastic levels of detail. Even at the standard settings pictures on to photo paper were very very good. Using the lower quality setting also increased print times too.

Plain old text documents were just as good with a draft sheet ready and waiting in 6 seconds. Even in draft mode the quality of the text was really good, you'd be able to use draft mode for the majority of your needs. In best mode a page of text took a more leisurely 53 seconds, but characters were a rich deep black and really sharp with few jagged edges.

The scanner was just as accomplished as the printer in this combo with detailed and accurate image capture. It took just 12 seconds from pressing scan to having a file ready to go on the PC. Colour and greyscale copies were fast too and impressive in their accuracy and quality.

Our quick take

There was no area in our testing where the Canon underperformed and as an all-in-one device it really impressed. It's easy to use, well designed and produces excellent quality across the board. It could perhaps have done with a Wi-Fi connection, but this really is nothing more than a passing observation as it is a superb device.