Canon Pixma MX372 Office All-in-One

As the Canon Pixma MX372 Office All-in-One?s $79.99 (direct) price suggests, it's very much a personal printer. It's also one of Canon's office inkjets?as indicated by the MX designation. Aimed primarily at home and micro offices, but also a potential choice for one person's use in any size office, it delivers a lot more capability than you might expect from a sub-$100 MFP. However, its high running cost makes it much less attractive than it would otherwise be.

Like most inkjet MFPs today, the MX372 can serve in a dual role for home and home office, or even as a strictly home printer. However, much like the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J430w ($100 street, 4 stars), it's unusual for the price in focusing more on the office side of that dual role.

In addition to printing from and scanning to a PC, it can fax from a PC and work as a standalone copier and fax machine. And unlike typical home-oriented printers, it 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. Missing from the MX372 are such photo-centric features as the ability to print directly from memory cards and PictBridge cameras.

Also missing is both Wi-Fi and wired network support, which makes it hard to share the printer easily, and largely limits it to personal use. The paper handling is also best reserved for a single person's use, with only a 100-sheet paper capacity, manual duplexing, and no paper handling upgrade options.

Setup and Speed
Setting up the MX372 is standard fare. For my tests, I installed it on a Vista system using a USB connection?the only choice. The speed is best described as lackadaisical even for the price, but not too much slower than most of its competition.

On our business applications suite I timed the MX372 (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing) at an effective 2.0 pages per minute (ppm). That?s essentially a tie with the HP Officejet 4500 All-in-One ($99.99 direct, 3.5 stars) at 2.1 ppm, but a bit slower than the Editors' Choice Kodak ESP C310 All-in-One Printer ($99.99 direct, 4 stars) at 2.7 ppm. It's also a lot slower than the Brother MFC-J430w, at 4.3 ppm, but keep in mind that the Brother printer's fast speed for business applications is a big part of why it is Editors' Choice.

Photo speed for the MX372 was more definitively slow, averaging 2 minutes 9 seconds for a 4 by 6. The Brother MFC-J430w wasn't much faster, at 1:59, but most of the competition leaves both printers in the dust, with the HP Officejet 4500 clocking in at 1:15, for example, and the Kodak ESP C310 taking just 44 seconds.

Output Quality and Other Issues
The MX372's overall output quality is below par, but not enough to be an issue. Text quality in particular is well below par, which translates to few fonts scoring well at sizes below 8 points. As long as you don't have an unusual need for smaller fonts, however, you shouldn't have any complaints.

Graphic output does better, at only slightly below par, but still good enough for any internal business need including PowerPoint handouts and the like. On the other hand, it's a bit short of what I'd want for output going to an important client or customer who I needed to impress with a sense of my professionalism.

Photos were par for an inkjet MFP overall, except for an obvious tint in black and white output. Color photos were generally at the low end of what I'd expect from drugstore prints, making the output acceptable for snapshots. If you want your photos to look their best, you'll want to look elsewhere, but that's pretty much expected from a printer that claims to be office-centric.

One other issue that can matter a lot or a little, depending on how much you expect to 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 MFC-J430w for both mono and color. Given the $20 difference in price between the two, you only have to print 800 pages before you've made up the difference. Beyond that, the total cost for the MX372 would be higher than for the Brother MFC-J430w, and the difference would increase with every page you print.

For many people, the high running cost will be enough reason to look elsewhere, since it's hard to imagine anyone printing fewer than 800 pages over the life of a printer. But if you don't expect to print much more than that, or don't mind the cost, or what you really need is some combination of an ADF equipped scanner, fax machine, and the ability to fax files from your PC's hard drive, the Canon Pixma MX372 Office All-in-One can do the job.

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