Canon Pixma MP480 All-in-One Printer

For a hundred bucks, you can hardly go wrong with this Canon printer all-in-one--unless you intend to use it a lot. Then, you're likely to find that the options it lacks (an automatic document feeder, a paper tray) will make a more expensive all-in-one a better choice. And while it's advertised as a photo printer, it's not as portable as other photo printers in this price range, so decide what you're looking for and what you need before you buy.

The first thing you'll notice about the Canon Pixma MP480 All-in-One Printer is that it looks a lot nicer than most other all-in-one printers. It's got a small footprint, rounded edges, and it's mostly in futuristic-looking white. Like many other Canon Pixmas, it's been cleverly engineered to take up as little space as possible on the desktop when not in use; for example, the paper output tray and small LCD monitor pop up only when you need them.

Next thing you'll notice is the noise; it makes an alarmingly loud grinding noise when warming up. This is not a printer that's meant for heavy use. Paper gets loaded in the back of the printer, and since only 100 pages can fit, it's not the right choice for a busy home office. Likewise, the manual duplexing feature (once the first side prints out, you flip the pages yourself and reload them) makes the best of the printer's lack of an automatic duplexer, but it's not convenient for anyone who uses that feature often.

Not surprisingly, the quality of prints was excellent. A 4x6 photo printed at normal quality took just under a minute to print, and came out already dry with vivid, sharp colors that I thought were comparable to many dedicated photo printers.

At draft quality (which I use for most of my printing jobs), the Pixma MP480 put out black and white pages in just over three seconds a page; color pages took about five seconds a page, though a few seconds longer at normal quality. The Pixma uses only two ink tanks which still managed to give great-looking prints (and it'll be cheaper replacing two tanks when they're empty than the five or six tanks that other inkjet all-in-ones use).

A Bluetooth adapter is available which will allow printing from a Bluetooth-enabled cell phone. I didn't get to test this; since Bluetooth printing is so popular, this should eventually be standard equipment.