Canon Pixma MX522 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer

Basically a beefed-up version of the Canon Pixma MX452 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer that I recently reviewed, the Canon Pixma MX522 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer adds enough extras to easily justify the higher price. Most notably, it adds an Ethernet port, a duplexer (for two-sided printing), a color LCD for the front panel menu, and the ability to print from a USB memory key. The extras make it that much more attractive as either a personal printer in any size office or for the dual role of home and home-office printer.

Like the Canon MX452, the MX522 can print and fax from, as well as scan to, a PC, and it can work as a standalone copier and fax machine. For scanning, it offers the same capability as well, with a letter-size flatbed supplemented by a 30-page automatic document feeder that can handle legal size pages. It also offers the same ability to scan to a USB key, but adds printing from a USB key as well, with the ability to preview the files on its 2.5-inch color LCD.

In theory, given that the MX522 offers both Ethernet and Wi-Fi, you can use it as a shared printer. In practice, however, its 100-sheet paper capacity limits its usefulness for sharing, except for the dual roll of home and home-office printer. Even by micro-office standards, a 100-sheet input tray is likely to empty out often enough to make refilling it a minor annoyance. Very much on the plus side, if you need to print duplex documents even occasionally, the automatic duplexer is a welcome convenience.

Other conveniences worth mention are support for printing through the cloud and support for AirPrint. You can't connect directly to the printer by Wi-Fi to use AirPrint, however. The printer and your phone or tablet will have to connect through a Wi-Fi access point on your network. One other convenience, primarily for home use, is Wireless PictBridge for printing wirelessly from a camera. However, the feature works only with select Canon cameras.

Setup, Speed, and Output Quality
For my tests, I connected the printer to a wired network and installed the drivers and software on a Windows Vista system. Setup was standard fare.

Unfortunately, print speed is not one of the MX522's strong points. When I reviewed the MX452, I pointed out that it was a little slow, but not unusually slow for the price. The MX522 isn't any faster. Given that it costs more, however, the speed is more of an issue.

On our business applications suite, I clocked the MX522 (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing) at the same 2.1 pages per minute (ppm) as I got for the MX452. In comparison, the similarly priced Editors' Choice Epson WorkForce WF-3520was more than twice as fast, at 4.4 ppm. Photo speed was also slow, averaging 2 minutes 9 seconds for a 4 by 6. The WF-3520 came in at just 1:12.

As with the Canon MX452, the MX522 does much better on output quality than on speed. It delivered better text in my tests than most inkjet MFPs, par quality for graphics, and just barely par quality for photos.

That makes both text and graphics good enough for most business needs, with the graphics output easily suitable for PowerPoint handouts and the like. Depending on your level of perfectionism, you may or may not consider the graphics quality good enough for output going to an important client or customer when you need it to look fully professional. Photo quality is roughly a match for the low end of what you would expect from drug store prints.

I'd like this printer a lot more if it offered higher paper capacity and better speed. However, it balances its shortcomings in both with its output quality for text and graphics and its full set of office-oriented MFP features, including the ADF, duplexer, standalone and PC-based faxing, and ability to scan to and print from a USB key. If you need more heavy-duty printing, be sure to look at the Epson WorkForce WF-3520. But if you don't print a lot of pages, the Canon Pixma MX522 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer can serve nicely for light-duty print needs with an emphasis on output quality.

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