The Canon Pixma MX455 is no looker, but for the low price it’s remarkably well-equipped
If the MG6350 is big, the Pixma MX455 is even bigger, adding more than 5cm to the height of Canon’s high-end device. It’s also a clumsy beast in many ways. The 100-sheet input tray is just the open front door. The output tray sits above, but it’s not long enough to catch pages as they emerge – for that you pull out the stopper on the input tray, which takes the total depth to nearly 65cm. It’s hardly an elegant solution, and it’s even more awkward when you start poking photo paper deep inside. See all printer reviews.
But this isn’t a premium device. At £79 it’s far cheaper than anything else here, yet Canon still manages to pack in a 30-sheet ADF on top of its chunky lid, and a Wi-Fi connection with AirPrint support. With no touchscreen – there’s just a two-line LCD – we had to type oursecurity key out letter by letter using the number-pad, but that’s only a one-off annoyance. See also Group test: what's the best multifunction printer?
Once up and running the MX455 is a perfectly good printer for the money. Its two ink tanks mean it won’t match the best here for print quality, but text was sharp and areas of colour were nice and solid, and only a grainy finish to photos noticeably betrayed the low budget. For all but the most public work, we’d be pretty happy with its output.
As with the MG6350, the MX455 insisted on regular pauses to let the ink dry, but we managed to eke out speeds of 5.7ppm for mono pages and 2.9ppm for colour. Again, in Windows we lowered the drying time, but the downloaded OS X 10.8 driver wouldn’t let us use the option. There’s no auto-duplex mode, and it’s slow when printing photos, taking 2mins 26secs for a 6 x 4in print at best quality and over four minutes for an A4 photo.
