Verdict

Pros

• 75mm touchscreen control
• Twin paper trays
• Front panel USB socket

Cons

• Noisy paper feed
• No borderless photo print
• Confusing network installation

What is the Canon MAXIFY MB2350?

It’s not often we see a completely new printer design come onto the test bench, but there’s been a glut of them recently. Perhaps in response to new machines from Epson and Brother, targeting the home office and small office markets, Canon has launched its own small business inkjet range called, rather lamely, MAXIFY.

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Canon MAXIFY MB2350 – Design and Features

The MAXIFY MB2350 sits just above entry-level in the range, but offers some features, like its dual paper trays, which we wouldn’t expect in this class of machine. It’s all-black case looks vaguely reminiscent of the home market PIXMA range, but has a bigger footprint and is a lot taller.

At the top of the machine is a flatbed scanner with a 50-sheet Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) and a fold-over feed tray and set into the front face of the lid is a 75mm LCD touchscreen. This is surrounded by six dedicated buttons, which is all that’s needed as most selections are tapped on the screen itself.

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There’s a USB socket near the left-hand edge of the front panel and this can be used for uploading documents or images for printing, and for downloading scanned pages.

At the bottom of the front panel, there are a pair of 250-sheet paper trays, which have to be extended before use and increase the overall footprint of the printer. The lower tray is mainly for A4 paper, but the upper one can take a wide variety of sizes. Every time you change the contents of a tray, you’re asked to register the details, so the printer knows the contents of each tray.

Canon MAXIFY MB2350 – Installation and Connections

The network installation is a little odd as, when searching for the printer on a wireless network, it reports its serial number, MAC address and IP address, but doesn’t display the model name, which makes life awkward if you have several different printers on your network.

A fold-down cover in the front panel gives access to the four ink cartridges. Although these are only available in one yield, it’s comparatively high with 1,200 pages for black and, oddly, three widely differing amounts for the cyan, magenta and yellow inks of 1020, 780 and 935 pages, respectively.

At the back are sockets for USB and 10/100 Ethernet networking, but the most useful connection is wireless, as it opens up direct printing from iOS and Android devices and remote print via several Cloud services.