The Canon PIXMA MX340 is a member of Canon’s small-business range of inkjet all-in-one printers. They have fewer facilities for the photo enthusiast and more for the small office, so you can expect to see fax and an Automatic Document Feeder (ADF), but not a memory card reader .
So without further ado, here we go . The large black and white box has a high-gloss top, which unfolds into a 30-sheet ADF , inset into the lid of its scanner. The display panel is a mono affair, and while it is useful, unfortunately there is no backlight, so reading it can be difficult in poor visibility .
To the left hand side of the display panel are three large buttons for copy, fax and scan. To the right is a number pad for dialling fax numbers and on the far right are two large buttons for black and colour copies.
In the front panel is a small illuminated blue badge, which shows that the machine is WI-FI compatible , and a pull-down cover which opens automatically if you forget it when printing. A flap pulls open at the rear to provide an input tray, which can take up to 100 sheets .
At the back are sockets for USB, Ethernet and a fax line, but many people will choose to connect via wireless and setup is straightforward .
This four-colour machine uses two ink cartridges, one black and the other tri-colour, and these are easy to fit under the scanner section which hinges up . Canon ink cartridges are numbered PG-510 black low capacity, and CL-511 colour low capacity. High capacity cartridges are numbered PG-512 & CL-513.
Canon has started quoting more realistic speeds for its machines and claims 7.5ppm for black print and 4.5ppm for colour. Our 5-page black text document completed in 54 seconds, giving a real-world speed of 5.6ppm, but the 20-page document boosted this to 6.9ppm, which is not a million miles away from the quoted speed . The five-page text and colour graphics document produced a speed of 2.4ppm, though, little more than half the rated speed, which was not so good . The machine performed quite a bit of housekeeping before starting some of these prints which would add to the slow speed results .
A single page colour copy completed in 41 seconds, while a 5-page black text copy from the ADF took one minute, 16 seconds; both of these times are quite acceptable for a machine in this price range and target market . A 15 x 10cm photo on Canon glossy photo paper, printed at High quality, took 1:21, but printing at Normal quality from a PictBridge camera, the time reduced to just 53 seconds
Both these photos were to Canon’s normal high standard, with colours looking very natural and showing good levels of detail. Dark areas of the image were less detailed than we normally see from Canon machines, and although this could be tweaked through software, we’ve seen better from earlier Canon all-in-ones .
Colour graphics on plain paper are pretty good, though there was noticeable dithering when printing lighter shades. Colour copies were adequate but with a little bleeding. Black text was general is reasonable, although we did see some feathering when using bold print fonts .
Using the high capacity cartridge variants produces costs of 4.3p for ISO black pages and 9.3p for ISO colour, both including 0.7p for paper. These costs are not great and other manufacturers machines do work out cheaper. Compatible cartridges are available for this printer and thus you could save money by using them.
Verdict
Canon’s PIXMA MX340 is a neat all-in-one machine, with reasonable speed, good fax facilities and fair print and copy performance. It’s quite expensive to run, though, and the print quality, is not quite up to the standard we associate with Canon .