Canon Pixma MX512 Wireless Office All-in-One

The Canon Pixma MX512 Wireless Office All-in-One ($149.99 direct) is essentially the same printer at its core as the Canon Pixma MX432 Wireless Office All-in-One ($99.99 direct, 2.5 stars). However, it includes lots of extras to justify the higher price, most notably a network connector and print duplexer (for printing on both sides of a page). Like the MX432, it's a potentially good fit for a home or micro office or as a personal printer in any size office. But even more than the MX432, it is best reserved for light-duty printing only, because in addition to costing more to buy, it shares the same high running cost.

The MX512 is part of Canon's office inkjet line. Its basic MFP capabilities include printing and faxing from, as well as scanning to, a PC?including over a network?and working as a standalone copier and fax machine. Office-centric features include a 30-page automatic document feeder (ADF), which supplements the letter-size flatbed and can handle both multipage documents and legal size pages.

For the dual role of home and home office printer, the MX512 also includes such photocentric features as being able to print directly from a PictBridge camera or memory cards, plus a 2.5-inch LCD display for previewing photos before printing.

Despite the welcome touch of the automatic duplexer, paper handling is a disappointment at this price. The 100-sheet paper capacity with no upgrade options limits the printer to light-duty use only. Given its high cost per page, however, the printer is best suited for light-duty printing in any case.

Setup and Speed
Setting up the MX512 is standard fare. For my tests, I connected it to wired network (it also offers WiFi) and ran the tests from a Windows Vista system.

On our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software) the MX512 tied the Canon MX432, at an effective 2.2 pages per minute (ppm). The speed counts as acceptable for the less expensive Canon MX432, but is best described as tolerable but sluggish at the MX512's price. In comparison, the similarly priced Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J825DW ($150 street, 4 stars) came in at 4.0 ppm, and the much less expensive Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J430w ($100 street, 4 stars) was even faster, at 4.3 ppm

Photo speed was closely matched to the two Brother printers, averaging 2 minutes 10 seconds for a 4 by 6. Although that's not an unusually slow speed for office-centric inkjets, however, it's slow compared with inkjets in general. The much less expensive HP Officejet 4500 All-in-One ($99.99 direct, 3.5 stars), for example, averaged 1:15, and it's not even particularly fast for photos.

Output Quality and Other Issues
Given that the MX512 has the identical print engine as the Canon MX432 according to Canon, it's not surprising that it delivered similar output quality on our tests, scoring a little below par for text, and absolutely par quality for graphics and photos. Slightly below par text translates to being good enough for most business purposes as long as you don't have an unusual need for small fonts.

Graphics quality is a match for the vast majority of inkjets, making it good enough for any internal business need, including PowerPoint handouts and the like. If you're not too much of a perfectionist, you may also consider it good enough for output going to an important client who you need to impress with a sense of your professionalism.

Color photos in my tests were generally a match for drugstore prints, which makes them good enough for snapshots, as long as you don't have too critical an eye. However, I saw a serious problem with black and white photos showing an annoyingly obvious tint. If you don't print black and white photos, however, that's obviously not a concern.

Potentially a killer for the MX512 is its high claimed cost per page, at 6.3 cents for a mono page and 13.8 cents for a color page. In comparison, the claimed cost per page for the MFC-J825DW is 3.8 cents for mono and 11.3 cents for color. The 2.5 cents extra per page in each case works out to $10 for every 400 pages you print.

Depending on how much you print, the Canon printer's high cost per page can make the total cost of ownership far higher than for printers like the Brother MFC-J825DW with the same initial cost but lower running costs. That makes the printer hard to recommend. Ultimately, the Canon Pixma MX512 Wireless All-in-One works well enough, and it offers all the features you likely need in a personal MFP, but its best to stay away from it unless you don't need anything more than extremely light-duty printing.

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