Product Reviews

If you're pushed for space, a multifunction device that combines both printer and scanner will be a godsend.

The MP130 is the latest photo-quality multifunction printer and scanner device from Canon. It also doubles up as a photocopier, allowing you to copy documents even when your PC is switched off.

Photo prints suffered from a faint orange-red colour cast. Detail was good but not perfect, and in common with the Pixma printers, you couldn't see every detail of the stones in our nature photo test. The colour range, on the other hand, was good, allowing the MP130 to produce graduations in shade and tone well. At standard quality, text was solid and black, rather

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than speckled and grey, as is the case with some printers. The MP130 also printed text quickly - spitting out our five-page document in just 59 seconds at standard quality. Photo printing, on the other hand, was rather slow. An A4 colour photo took 6 minutes and 40 seconds to print.

Scan quality was good. The MP130 had no trouble distinguishing detail in areas of highly saturated dark and light. It also coped well with tightly-packed stripes of colour that blend one into the other. Some printers render these as distinct bands, with no blending, but the MP130 didn't. Colour and detail were reproduced accurately, standing up well to close comparison with the originals. The descreen option also worked well. We scanned in pictures from a magazine and the descreen filter removed any trace of a dot pattern.

The MP130 is also comparatively expensive to run. A single sheet of text costs 5.3p to print and a photo 8.8p. Our current Best Buy, HP's PSC 1315, prints a single text page for 3.3p, and a photo for 7.5p.

Canon's Pixma is nicely designed, prints and scans well, and has a built-in card reader. It doesn't take our Best Buy award, however, as it's more expensive to run than the PSC 1315, and some finer details don't show up on prints.