Canon's Pixma MP620 colour inkjet multifunction printer offers connectivity and capacity galore.

While its design has a few shortcomings, overall the Canon Pixma MP620 offers a good deal, especially for a busy home or school setting.

A few premium features distinguish the silvery Canon Pixma MP620. The control panel replaces a raft of buttons with a scrollwheel that lets you spin through options shown on the adjacent, tiltable, 2.5in colour LCD. The remaining buttons are clearly labelled and easy to use.

Standard connectivity covers USB, Ethernet, and Wi-Fi; you need a extra-cost adaptor to enable Bluetooth. The Canon Pixma MP620 has two media slots that take most kinds of cards, but you'll need to buy a third-party adaptor to use the XD Picture Card format. The PictBridge port accepts only Canon-compatible devices.

The 150-sheet output tray automatically unfolds itself from the Canon Pixma MP620's front panel when you initiate a print job. You get two 150-sheet input trays: one underneath for letter-size plain paper, and a second in the rear for larger or thicker media.

Unfortunately, on our test unit, raising the telescoping guides for the rear vertical input involved a lot of tugging and clattering, and we accidentally collapsed them numerous times. Another drawback: the Canon Pixma MP620 lacks an automatic document feeder (ADF) and duplexing capabilities.

The Canon Pixma MP620 performed fairly well in our tests. It posted average speeds, producing 7.6 pages per minute (ppm) with plain text and 2.2ppm with graphics. The printer's pigment black ink produced impressively crisp, dark letters.

On colour graphics it uses a dye-based second black, plus cyan, magenta, and yellow. We found a bit too much yellow in some of our colour graphics samples; flesh tones, in particular, looked orangey on plain paper and a little jaundiced on Canon's own photo paper. Despite that and a slight graininess, images otherwise look vivid and natural. Scan and copy tests yielded good results as well.

At the time of this writing, Canon had yet to publish yields for the five separate ink cartridges. Other Canon printers with a similar design have had reasonable costs.

Canon's usually solid documentation had one notable problem this time: the printed Setup Guide features a confounding flowchart of installation options that stymie rather than advance the process. Aside from that, Canon's better-than-average rating in our Reliability and Service survey bodes well for your overall experience.