The driver also automatically installs Canon's Easy-PhotoPrint EX software onto your computer. This software allows you to flaunt all the creative features of the MX330. It lets you print simple snapshot photos on the fly, create whole albums of artwork, print calendars with custom pictures, and print custom stickers using Canon's proprietary sticker paper.
The explorer window on the main page works just like a Windows Explorer pane. But we prefer HP's Solution Center layout, which automatically scans and detects printable pictures on your hard drive for you. Canon's creative suite is incredibly easy to use, however, and even lets you make simple photo edits, like red-eye correction, face sharpening and blemish removal, which is great for users that don't want to deal with the hassle of third-party editing software like Adobe Photoshop.
The copy functions on the MX330 are relatively standard for a multi-function device: you can make up to 99 copies at once and easily adjust the contrast and magnification of a document from 25 per cent to 400 per cent, all directly through the settings on the LCD display.
The scanner gives you two options: either scan single photos and documents or a stack of documents using the automatic document feeder. You also have several choices in terms of where you want to send a scanned document, such as directly to a PC as a JPEG, TIFF, BMP or PDF file, or attached to an email, with the option to scan and convert to text using optical character recognition. All scanned files are placed into your custom 'my box' directory, which displays all scanned and imported images, as well as images recently saved onto the hard drive.
Performance
As you can tell from the benchmarks, the MX330 demonstrates only average speed across the board. It jumped ahead most noticeably in the colour-text speed test, producing 5.54 pages per minute. That means it ties with the more expensive HP Officejet J6480. On the other hand, the MX330 suffered in the photo speed test, producing just 0.93 pages per minute, just ahead of the J6480, which produced only 0.83 pages per minute. Since this isn't a full-blown photo printer, we can forgive the MX330 for dropping the ball on photo print speed, since the rest of the scores are at least average or faster than the competition.
We have several complaints about the MX330's output quality. We printed all photo and graphical documents on the paper that Canon provided and were still largely dissatisfied with the results. Black text appears satisfactorily darkened, but closer inspection reveals characters with jagged edges, fuzziness with small font sizes, and harsh contrasts in colour blends. In addition, our colour graphics prints came out grainy, with a dull hue marring the images. Luckily, our 76 by 127mm photo turned out okay, with sharper lines and an even saturation, but the skin tones in the portrait shots still couldn't shake the dreary palette.
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
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Presentation speed |
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Photo speed (one sheet) |
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Colour graphics speed |
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Text speed |
Conclusion
The Canon Pixma MX330 will definitely satisfy those for whom low cost and robust features are more of an issue than output quality, but dedicated shooters should seek out a more capable machine to bring their photos to life.
Additional editing by Charles Kloet
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