The Canon Pixma MX330 is an all-in-one inkjet printer that is made for the small home office plus the business. There are no separate ink tanks for this all-in-one, just two cartridges, one color, the other black.

The black tank is pigment based ink while the color tank is dye based, in an effort to give you the best of both worlds; pigment intended for higher text quality, dye intended for better photographic quality. Canon lists the page yield as 220 for the black tank and 244 for the color.

The MX330 has a 1200 x 2400 dpi scanner, as well as an automatic document feeder for batch scanning and copying, holding up to 30 A4 sheets. It is also capable of producing collated copies so you can put 2 or 4 to a page. You can put a memory card in the front USB slot and scan directly to it if you want too.

There’s a 1.8-inch LCD screen to help navigate menus and make use of the drive – it takes up less space than many you’ll find in modern all-in-ones, but it works. To add to Canon’s business side, there’s also a 33.6 kpps fax.

Style wise, the Canon is pretty harmless with a gray and black surface. Build quality is similar to standard Canon quality, plus the MX330 feels like it’s going to survive hectic business office life.

The lack of individual ink tanks and automatic document feeder, as well as fax, set the MX330 apart as a device aimed at those who do more with business documents than images. The test results also reflected this. Text quality is actually healthy for an ink-based machine – it’s on par with some laser-quality prints we’ve seen. Crisp, strong blocks of text are evident in both normal and best modes, and the quality of the draft was spectacular. A page of draft text came out and was ready in 9 seconds, and this is certainly not bad, however, a page of better text was a bit slow at 1 minute 37 seconds. Barely an age, though slower compared to several of Canon’s alternative all-in-ones.

Ten pages of graphics and text were also slow at 6 minutes, though the quality more than made up for the amount of time used. The quality of the combined text and graphics output was excellent, so it’s obvious exactly where this printer’s chops lie.

Overall photographic performance wasn’t all that outstanding, but by no means terrible. An A4 image took just 1 minute 42 seconds, and that’s impressive, however the quality was more in-between. There were clearly shortcomings in fine detail within the dark areas, however color was accurate and overall tone was decent. If you only print the occasional shot, the Canon will probably be fine, but this is all we can do.

The Canon Pixma MX330 is obviously aimed at those who print more text and PDF documents than images and is excellent at doing so with its two ink cartridges. At £80 it is excellent value for money.

Overall, we liked the Canon because it works efficiently, although the images are not good, it’s not made for that, so we can pass it up. For a small office all-in-one with fax and automatic document feeder, Canon offers great features and functionality for the price.