Thursday, March 15, 2012

Canon Pixma MX432 Wireless Office All-in-One


A close cousin to the Canon Pixma MX372 Office All-in-One ($79.99 direct, 2.5 stars), the Canon Pixma MX432 Wireless Office All-in-One ($99.99 direct), is the next step up in Canon's office inkjet line, adding WiFi and slightly faster speed. As with the Canon MX372, the MX432 is aimed primarily at home and micro offices, although it can serve as a personal printer in any size office. However, it also shares the MX372's high running cost, which limits its attractiveness unless you don't print a lot of pages.

Like the Canon MX372, as well as the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J430w ($100 street, 4 stars), the MX432 is unusual for an inkjet in this price range for focusing more on features suitable for the office than on home-oriented features like photo printing. However, it's a little more suited to the dual role of home and home office than the Canon MX372, thanks to the its ability to print directly from PictBridge cameras.

Office-centric features include printing from and scanning to a PC, faxing from a PC, and working as a standalone copier and fax machine. In addition, you can scan multi-page documents and legal size pages easily thanks to a 30-page automatic document feeder (ADF) that supplements the letter-size flatbed. Paper handling is limited, with a 100-sheet capacity, manual duplexing only, and no paper handling options, but it should be enough in most cases for a personal printer.

Setup and Speed
For my tests, I installed the MX432 on a Vista system using its USB connection. Setup was typical for the category. As I've already suggested, the printer did a little better on speed than the Canon MX372. However, its speed is best described as no more than acceptable.

Canon Pixma MX432 Wireless Office All-in-One

The MX432 clocked in our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software) at an effective 2.2 pages per minute (ppm). That makes it a touch faster than the Canon MX372 at 2.0 ppm, and basically tied with the HP Officejet 4500 All-in-One ($99.99 direct, 3.5 stars) at 2.1 ppm. All three printers are a lot slower than the Brother MFC-J430w , at 4.3 ppm, which is one reason why the MFC-J430w is Editors' Choice.

Photo speed was slower relative to most other inkjets in this price range, averaging 2 minutes 8 seconds for a 4 by 6. The MFC-J430w was almost as slow, at 1:59, but most inexpensive inkjets are significantly faster. The HP Officejet 4500 , for example, took just 1:15 in our tests.

Output Quality and Other Issues
Output quality is another area where the MX432 does a bit better than the MX372, scoring below par for an inkjet for text, but dead on par for graphics and photos. It maintained readability a little better than the MX372 on fonts smaller than 8 points, but not enough better to earn a higher score. If you rarely use small font sizes, however, you should find the text quality acceptable.

Graphics output is easily good enough for any internal business need, including PowerPoint handouts and the like. Depending on how much of a perfectionist you are, you may also consider it good enough for output going to an important client or customer. Color photos were roughly equivalent to prints from a local drugstore, but I saw an annoyingly obvious tint in a black and white photo. If you print color photos only, however, that won't be a problem.

One issue that could matter a lot, depending on how much you print, is the high claimed cost per page, at 6.3 cents for a mono page and 13.8 cents for a color page. That's 2.5 cents more per page than the Brother MFC-J430w for both mono and color pages, which means that getting the Brother printer can save you $10 for every 400 pages you print.

For many people, the high running cost will be enough reason to cross this printer off their list. But if you don't print much, or don't mind the running cost, it can do what it promises. And if what you really need is an ADF-equipped scanner and fax machine plus the ability to fax files from your PC's hard drive, the Canon MX432 Wireless Office All-in-One can certainly fill that slot.

More Multi-function Printer Reviews:
??? Canon Pixma MX432 Wireless Office All-in-One
??? Canon Pixma MX372 Office All-in-One
??? Brother MFC-9125CN
??? Panasonic KX-MB1500
??? HP LaserJet Pro M1217nfw MFP
?? more

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