Canon PIXMA MP550

Canon has two new all-in-one PIXMA printers out. The MP550 and MP560 are for make at-home document and photo printing, with copying and scanning abilities, too.

I tested the PIXMA MP550. It shares a self-opening paper tray with the MP560. This is a good idea – you know when you choose Print then realise you forgot to open the paper tray? On these new Canons, the door just pops open for you. And I don’t mean the print pushes it out either, which is what caused paper jams when you get it wrong – the door pops open even before printing starts.

The MP550 is the entry-level individual model, giving consumers value for money by allowing them to replace colours as they run out. It has two-way paper feeding, so you can can load good photo paper in the rear tray while you keep ordinary A4 paper in the front, bottom-slide cassette. 

The MP550  also has a new integrated easy-scroll wheel – this appears on a right-side binnacle that folds open to stand upright. It’s fairly easy to use but doesn’t seem the heaviest of designs – you have to wonder how long it will last in an era in which it’s cheaper to replace a printer than get it repaired, and in which I suspect companies can make more profit from ink sales than they can from sales of yer actual printers. 

The recession

There’s another aspect of recessionary product reviewing I will mention – I used to get a printer to look at for review, along with some sheets of A4 glossy and a couple of smaller sizes, all in all perhaps 20-50 sheets. This was also a good way to showcase different types of papers that companies like Epson and Canon produce. Nowadays you’re lucky if you get a 10x15cm sample pack with three sheets in it, hardly a scenario for doing a comprehensive review. So the outcome is that I have to pay to review, effectively, by purchasing my own paper, while the review I post, presumably, helps a printer makers’ sales. 

Luckily I had my own USB cable, in this case, or I’d have to buy that too. 

Anyway, such recessionary gripes aside, the PIXMA MP550 has an impressive feature set – it can print directly from camera, most cellphones and memory cards, or even from a USB flash memory ‘thumb-drive’. It has Auto Scan mode for the 2400dpi CIS scanner, two-way paper feeding and a 2 inch LCD screen.

For Windows you also get Auto Photo Fix I and Easy-WebPrint EX.

The cars are behind an opening door, which is good as a dust preventer, and the USB thumb drive slot is below that. This wouldn’t work for me – the LCD message was first that a USB drive was inserted, second that it was reading photo data, and third that there was no photo data on the drive. Which there was, and shot on a Canon camera, too. So maybe that’s a PC thing, or it needs a newer model of camera than my old G5 to pt in EXIF (or whatever) data for the printer to discover?  

Print quality

The new printers both use Canon’s FINE print head technology. It certainly produces beautiful photo-prints on Canon’s Photo Paper Plus Glossy II. To the naked eye, the prints are snappy, hold lots of detail and printed true colours without any intercession on my part in Photoshop. Under a magnifying glass (my prepress loupe) you can see that fine patina of dots, even on an image shot on a 24MP Canon 5D MkII. These dots are coming from the printer, not the camera, but are you going to look at your prints under a glass? Because if you don’t, they’re not only perfectly acceptable, they’re a lot better than most, and certainly no worse than the grain structure in traditional analogue 100ASA colour prints, which you’ve probably also never looked at under a glass. 

In fact, on closer inspection, you can see the fine interleaving of dots in the MP550 really allows fine details to be reproduced, compared to Canon technology of even two years ago. 

The fine dot pattern of an MP550 print at 900%

Dot pattern from a print at 900% from a Canon inkjet print from two years ago

900% enlargement of traditional analogue print

Scanner

The scanner is really fast compared to those of even two years ago. Canon’s software boots into a kind of no-brainer amateur mode called Auto Scan Mode (that does sound better than ‘no brainer mode’, I will grant Canon’s marketers that) which may serve most people – going into Basic Mode gives you a little more control, while Advanced Mode gives you even more, like the ability to ‘descreen’ commercially printed source images (these have little ink dots, much bigger than those created by inkjets like these, and cause annoying moiré patterns in scans. 

You may not get the all the options you’d get from a high-end dedicated scanner, but considering this scans at 2400dpi (a combination of 1200dpi horizontal and vertical), there are enough to keep many happy – and the results are very good. 

In Advanced Mode (above), you do get to set scan resolution (up to 1200x1200), set output size (up to 2592x1944 pixels), set Image Adjustment for different media (newspaper, magazine, photo …), turn on Unsharp Mask, Descreen, Reduce Dust & Scratches (none, low, medium and high), the same four options for fading, grain, backlight and gutter shadow correction, and you can edit the histograms if you know what that’s about, plus colour cast, brightness and curves. All pretty good for a multifunction device at this price. 

This is a consumer model – if you need a scanner that demystifies and simplifies the process of getting a good scan fast, this is pretty good, and can work out that you’ve put two or three separate images on the platen. 

Card Reader

The MP550 also has a built-in card reader, in the front behind a little silver swing-out door and beneath the pop-up control binnacle. 

Putting in a CF card, the images were instantly available on the little built-in LCD display, and they also appeared on my Mac desktop and Image Capture (which I prefer to iPhoto for grabbing images) immediately booted and saw the contents, too.

So now I can both download the pictures into my Mac or print them straight from the card. And this works admirably. Good. 

Image showing the silver card draw open at right, under the control binnacle, and with the main paper tray open and loaded beneath the door into which finished prints load 

Conclusion: altogether a comprehensive little unit that’s quiet and fast and useful. If I had to quibble, the 2-inch LCD display on the MP550 only really qualifies as ‘better than nothing’. It’s too small to really do anything with an image, but it does let you see what’s going on, and select what you want to print, presuming you have no computer to work from.  

What’s great  very good print quality and fast scan times; two paper trays but still compact. The way the paper output pops open, avoiding paper jams, is excellent

What’s not  little LCD, and the control shuttle thing (sorry, the ‘Integrated Easy-Scroll wheel’) does not seem very durable – time will tell. If you have a Windows’ PC, you get more software (it could be argued you don’t need it with a Mac because of the compatibility, iPhoto etc). 

Needs  a little office, or a home user requiring printing, copying, scanning and photography tasks

Looks 7/10

Usability 8/10

Value for money 9/10

> Canon PIXMA MP550 multifunction, RRP $229. 
(The MP560, which adds wireless connectivity, is only $20 more, at $249).

Description  a greatly refined version of Apple’s excellent OS X Leopard. 

System  Mac OS X v.10.5+ (Intel processor, PowerPC G5, PowerPC G4, 867MHz or faster/512MB), Mac OS X v.10.4 (Intel processor, PowerPC G5, PowerPC G4, PowerPC G3 / 256MB), Mac OS X v.10.3.9 (Intel processor, PowerPC G5, PowerPC G4, PowerPC G3 / 128MB) Mac OS Extended (Journaled), Mac OS Extended

Safari / CD-ROM drive / Hard disk space 800MB* / Display XGA 1024x768 * for bundled software installation. 

I tested with OS 10.6.1 Snow Leopard and found no issues.

Windows: Windows Vista, Vista SP1 (1GHz processor, 512MB RAM) / Windows XP SP2, SP3 and Windows 2000 Professional SP4 (300MHz processor, 128MB RAM)

Contact Canon on 0800 222 666, or visit the website.