Wordprints The Art Of Technology

The Canon Pixma MX360 Inkjet Office All-In-One ($79.99 direct) is a good low-priced MFP (multifunction printer) for a home-business owner who wants to connect a printer directly to his or her PC. It prints, copies, scans, and faxes, and has an automatic document feeder (ADF). Above-par text quality, and solid graphics and photos round out the picture.

The 7.8 by 18.1 by 16.4-inch (HWD) MX360 weighs 18 pounds has rounded corners and white sides. The ADF and input tray on top are surrounded by a black beveled strip that gives the front panel–which holds the display, alphanumeric fax keypad, and a number of function buttons—an upward tilt.

The MX360 is slightly more basic than the Canon Pixma MX340 ($99.99 direct, 4 stars) that we reviewed last spring. It lacks WiFi and Ethernet connectivity. It has no media-card slots—which may be just as well, as you can’t preview photos on the one-line monochrome text display. It does have a port for a PictBridge-enabled camera, or a USB key (which you can scan to, but not print from).

The lack of these features shouldn’t deter a home-business owner looking for a USB-connected PC, as the computer’s own display, ports, and card slots can handle all the photo or file transfer and viewing. The MX360 offers fax capability, as well as a 30-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) for scanning, copying, or faxing multi-page documents. A 100-sheet paper feeder, though par for the MX360′s price, limits its business use to the lightest of home-office duties.

Printer Category: Ink Jet

Type : All-In-One

Color or Monochrome: 1-pass color

Ink Jet Type: Standard All-Purpose

Connection Type :USB

Maximum Standard Paper Size : Legal

Direct Printing from Cameras :No

Standalone Copier and Fax : Copier, Fax

Print Duplexing: Manual with guidance

Click Here More Detail about Canon Pixma MX360 Inkjet Office All-In-One

We tested the MX360 over a USB 2.0 connection to a computer running Windows Vista.

We clocked the MX360 on the latest version of our business applications suite (as timed with QualityLogic’s hardware and software), which combines graphics pages, text pages, and pages with mixed content, at 1.8 effective pages per minute (ppm). This matched the Pixma MX340′s speed, while the Editors’ Choice Epson Stylus NX625 ($149 direct, 4 stars) zipped through the tests at 4 ppm. The Brother MFC-J410w ($100 street, 3.5 stars) was a little faster than the Canon, at 2.2 ppm.

Text quality was good for an inkjet, and very good for an MFP at its price. Characters were reasonably crisp and dark for an inkjet. Output is good enough for internal business use, though you might not want to use the MX360 for documents such as resumes with which you want to impress someone through their visual appearance.

Graphics quality was on a par with the majority of inkjets we’ve tested, good enough for general business use, including PowerPoint handouts. Colors were rich. Issues, all minor, included banding (a regular pattern of stripes of discoloration in some solid-color areas), dithering (the breakdown of solid areas into fine graininess), and trouble printing some very thin lines.

Photo quality was typical of inkjet MFPs. Colors were well saturated but not overly so. A monochrome print showed a slight tint. There was some loss of detail in bright areas in a couple of the photos. Their overall quality was at about the level you’d expect of drugstore prints.

In addition to serving as a home-office MFP, the Canon Pixma MX360 could fill double duty as a home-office and home printer, thanks to its decent photo quality, or it could serve as a personal printer in a larger office. It has its limitations befitting an $80 MFP. Its speed and paper capacity are typical of its price, and you’re limited to connecting it directly to a PC via USB. But it has fax and an ADF (which the Editors’ Choice Epson Stylus NX625—though far faster and with a fuller feature set, lacks—and prints beautiful text, plus solid graphics and photos. The Brother MFC-J410w offers more features—such as an (admittedly tiny) LCD screen and Wi-Fi capabilities—but it stumbles a bit on output quality, which is one place where the MX360 shines.