Canon Pixma MX882 All-in-One Printer

The Canon Pixma MX882 is a worthy upgrade to the Pixma line. While it offers many of the same features as the MX860, it's much faster and almost the same price. The printer has built-in wireless and an automatic duplexer, and an extended keypad that helps keep the printer's face from being overly busy (though it's still pretty full). Speeds were excellent, particularly for photos, and quality was everything I expected from a Canon printer. It is a fairly big multifunction printer, however, and takes up about as much space as a laser printer.

One of the flagships of the next generation of Canon Pixma printers, the Pixma MX882 multifunction printer adds some upgrades to the line--particularly in terms of speed--but leaves some conveniences to be desired. Like many other Pixma all-in-ones, it's still a big, square, black box (this one weighs in at over 25 lbs). And it doesn't offer a large color touchscreen that more manufacturers are rolling out. While it does have a color 2.5-inch LCD, less impressive is what Canon calls the "new Dual Function Panel [that] makes navigating through menus and functions a much smoother process." In fact I found the extra, unlabeled buttons a bit confusing at first (they make sense when you use the fax), and wasn't able to figure out how to turn off the loud beeps that come with every press of a button. Update: March 21, 2011. Many thanks to alert reader Martijn Verduin of The Netherlands who notes that there is a place under the Device User Settings menu to adjust the volume on the keypad.

On the bright side, Canon has ramped up speed printing times impressively with the MX882. While the similarly priced Canon Pixma MX860 took over a minute to print a 4x6 photo at normal quality, the MX882 took a very respectable 33 seconds, without sacrificing the quality or sharpness that Canon Pixmas are known for. Warm up and first-page-out times were also impressive, with the first page of a Word document (across a wireless network) out in 16 seconds at normal quality, and successive pages taking about five seconds each. A large PDF took a bit longer to get started and pages took about twice as long as with the Word document.

The MX882 uses five ink cartridges, which seems to help produce vivid and sharp prints and photos. Graphics in particular looked good, though the photos were completely acceptable, if not astonishing. Still, it is an all-in-one, so no big issue there.

Setting up the printer took a while but was glitch-free; even getting the built-in wireless to work was easy. So like most Pixmas I've tried, there's nothing wrong with the MX882; it's an updated version of earlier Pixmas and it comes at much the same price. It seems they'd be eager to phase out the old lines since there's little reason to spend almost the same money on the MX860.

Disclosure: Review samples were provided by the manufacturer. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.