Canon Pixma MX338

By Justin Yu
Jul 10, 2009

Just because you're on a budget doesn't mean you should be relegated to buying some cheap printer that can't function outside of simple text documents. If you need a device that can fax, copy, scan and print on a wide variety of media, the Canon Pixma MX338 will make a perfect addition to your home office. At S$299, this All-in-One (AIO) boosts productivity by adding an automatic document feeder and a full-color 1.8-inch LCD. Although we have complaints about the output quality and missing features, we can't argue with the bundle of features and the excellent value you'll get in the Canon Pixma MX338.

Design And Features

The design of the Pixma MX338 is streamlined so that every drawer, tray and port folds flush into the body. The result is a very sleek matte-black and battleship-gray exterior with all of the buttons you need to adjust the settings conveniently placed on the front panel. Since the default function is to print, the rest of the hot keys (copy, fax and scan) are the largest on the panel, surrounded by the power button and two small LEDs to indicate usage and a blinking alarm for low ink or paper jams.

The bright 1.8-inch LCD screen sits prominently in the middle of the control panel, and while we're normally used to adjusting the angle of the screens on Pixma printers, we're thankful Canon includes an LCD at all in this price range. The rest of the controls are shortcut buttons for the menu, settings and a directional pad with a corresponding "OK" button for navigating through various options. There are also three more buttons for black and color copies and a Stop Print button for emergency cancels. Overall, the MX338 measures a maneuverable 45.8 x 41 x 198mm.

Most AIOs typically don't include automatic document feeders at this price point, so we're happy to see that Canon has implemented one to make it much easier to scan or copy stacks of documents. The automatic document feeder can handle only up to 30 pages at a time, so the majority of your blank media go through the rear input tray that holds 100 pages, and a plastic guide folds out of the rear tray to cajole larger media. On the other hand, output is a much more simplified process: All prints pop out of the front drawer onto an angled lip which folds out of the printer body. We're disappointed to see the MX338 didn't include a multimedia card reader for direct prints. But you can hook up a digital camera directly to the printer through the PictBridge USB port at the bottom of the unit.

The top of the inkbox lifts open to reveal the standard 8.5 x 11-inch scanner bay, but you can pop that open to access the two ink cartridge bays below. To keep costs low, the MX338 uses only two cartridges: One for black and the other for tri-colors. While we prefer five or sometimes even six separate cartridge tanks to cut down on the cost of consumables, it makes sense that a printer at this conservative retail price has only two tanks. If you plan to use your machine for more snapshot photo prints or graphical documents, an inkbox with separate ink cartridge bays will prove more economical.

The package includes a driver CD with all the installation files you need to customize your prints. Within those settings, you can choose between commonly used templates such as standard, business, paper saving, and photo printing that adjust the type of media, paper size, and source. Additionally, the driver provides you with adjustments for borderless printing, vivid photos, grayscale prints and even manual color intensities by numeral increments. It also features a popup print status monitor that shows the current job, document name, device owner, status, and a graphical representation of the ink cartridge levels. Conveniently, this popup automatically disappears once the job in queue is finished with printing, but we prefer status monitors that show us the page and progress of the print.

The driver also automatically installs Canon's Easy Photo Print EX software onto your computer that flaunts all the creative features of the MX338. It lets you print simple snapshot photos on the fly, create whole albums of artwork, print calendars with custom pictures, and custom stickers using Canon's proprietary sticker paper. The explorer window on the main page works just like a Windows Explorer pane, except we prefer HP's Solution Center layout that 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 such as red-eye correction, face sharpening, and blemish removal, which is great for users who don't want to deal with the hassle of third-party editing software like Adobe Photoshop.

The copy functions on the MX338 are relatively standard for a multifunction device: You can make up to 99 copies at once and easily adjust the contrast and magnification of a document from 25 percent to 400 percent, all directly through the settings on the LCD menus. The scanner gives you two options to scan either 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 to a PDF file. Or you can attach it 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 recently saved images onto the hard drive for future projects.

Tags: Cartridge, Printer, MX338, Printing, multimedia

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