Canon Pixma MX922 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer

A close cousin to the Canon Pixma MX522 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer, the Canon Pixma MX922 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer offers all the features that makes the MX522 worth considering, plus enough extraincluding better photo quality, the ability to print on optical discs, and a higher paper capacityto make it far more attractive as a home printer or in the dual role of home and home office printer, and also more suitable for sharing in a micro office. More than that, it offers enough extra to make this inkjet MFP an Editors' Choice.

Like the Canon MX522, the MX922 can print and fax from, as well as scan to, a PC; it can work as a standalone copier and fax machine; and it can both scan to and print from a USB key, with the ability to preview images on its three-inch color LCD. It also offers both Ethernet and Wi-Fi support, a duplexer (for two-sided printing), and both a letter size flatbed and an automatic document feeder (ADF) for scanning.

One small extra for the MX922 compared with the Canon MX522 is that its ADF offers a little higher capacity, at 35 pages. More important, it adds the ability to scan in duplex, by turning the page over to scan the second side. Menu commands let it work in combination with duplex printing to copy both single- and double-sided originals to your choice of single- or double-sided copies

Ethernet and Wi-Fi connection options let you share the printer easily on a network. Unlike the Canon MX522, however, the MX922 offers enough paper capacity, at 250 sheets, to make it practical to share in a typical micro office without having to constantly refill the paper tray. In addition, a separate photo paper tray, for up to 20 sheets of 4-by-6-inch photo paper, lets you switch between printing photos and printing on plain paper without having to swap out the paper in the tray.

One other convenience, which I've also seen on other recent Canon printers, is Wireless PictBridge for printing wirelessly from a camera, but it works only with select Canon cameras. Support for mobile printing includes printing through the cloud and printing with AirPrint. Note that to use AirPrint, both the printer and your phone or tablet must connect through a Wi-Fi access point on your network, rather than connecting directly to each other.

Setup, Speed, and Output Quality
Setting up the MX922 on a network was absolutely typical for an inkjet MFP. For my tests, I used an Ethernet connection and installed the drivers and software on a Windows Vista system.

Print speed is the MX922's Achilles' heel. It came in on our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing) at a lackadaisical 2.4 pages per minute (ppm). That makes it just a little faster than the less expensive Canon MX522, at 2.1 ppm, and significantly slower than any number of similarly-priced printers, including, for example, the Editors' Choice Epson WorkForce WF-3540, at 4.5 ppm.

Partly making up for the slow speed for business applications is its reasonably fast speed for photos, with a 1 minute 5 second average for printing a 4 by 6. That's actually a touch faster than the WF-3540, at 1:12.

The good news is that the MX922's output quality does even more than its long list of features to make up for any shortcomings in speed. Graphics quality in my tests was at the low end of par, but text quality was just a step below the top tier for inkjets, and photo quality was in the top tier for low-cost inkjets.

Although I wouldn't use the text output for a resume or serious desktop publishing applications, it's easily good enough for most business needs. Graphics output, similarly, is more than good enough for any internal business need. Depending on how critical an eye you have, you may also consider it good enough for PowerPoint handouts and the like.

Photos are a step above what I expect from the best drugstore prints, which makes them better than most inkjets can manage. For still better photo output, you'd have to move up to far more expensive models aimed at professional and near-professional photographers and graphic artists.

If you print enough pages so that fast speed is an absolute requirement, you'll want to look elsewhere. However, for most home, home office, and micro office use, the Canon Pixma MX922 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer should be fast enough. More important, its output quality, paper capacity, and long list of MFP featuresfrom the duplexing ADF, to the ability to print on optical discs, to the ability to print from or scan to a USB keywill, for most people, more than make up for the relatively pokey speed. And the overall balance is what makes the Canon Pixma MX922 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer an Editors' Choice.