Sometimes what's new and exciting in a new printer or all-in-one (AIO) is obvious from the instant you take it out of the box. Sometimes such highlights show up during testing, things like impressively fast performance, eye-catching high quality, or way cool features. And sometimes, as with the Canon Pixma MP610 Photo All-In-One ($199.99 direct) . . . well . . . there just isn't anything that qualifies.

This isn't to say that there are no new features at all, or that the MP610 is a poorly designed product—in fact, it earns a slot as Editors' Choice, replacing the MP600 that it also replaces in Canon's line. But it's hard to see why Canon bothered with a new model, since the MP610 and MP600 are all but identical for most purposes.

The MP610 is designed primarily as a home AIO, strong on photo-related features. These include a PictBridge connector, card slots, and a 2.5-inch color LCD for previewing photos. It lacks an automatic document feeder (ADF) and fax support, which are important for most offices. But even so, it can serve as a light-duty home-office AIO or do double duty for both home and home-office use.

Paper handling is a strong point. As with most Canon printers and AIOs, the MP610 offers built-in duplexing and two 150-sheet paper trays for a substantial 300-sheet total. Even better, the two trays let you keep both plain and photo paper loaded, so you can switch between documents and photos without having to change paper.

Built around Canon's five-cartridge ink system, the MP610 uses a separate cartridge for each color—cyan, yellow, magenta, dye-based photo black, and pigment-based black for text. Physical setup consists of finding a suitable spot for the 7.7 x 17.7 x 15.3-inch (HWD) AIO, plugging it in, turning it on, installing the print head and five cartridges, and loading paper. You can then run the automated installation program and connect by USB cable when the program tells you to.

At a casual—or even not-so-casual—glance, the biggest difference between the MP610 and MP600 seems to be the uptick in the model number. I'm not exaggerating. After I finished analyzing the MP610's test results, the one thing that stood out was how closely they matched last year's results for the MP600. The total time on our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software, www.qualitylogic.com) was 12 minutes 18 seconds, which counts as a tie with the MP600's 12:13. More than that, the speed for each individual file was tied, differing by no more than 1 second in any case.

Not so incidentally, for business applications, both models are also among the fastest ink jet AIOs I've tested regardless of price, and much faster than any direct competitor. The similarly priced Kodak EasyShare 5300 All-In-One printer, for example, was far slower, at 21:18. Photo speed for the two Canon models was essentially tied, and also fast for the price, with the MP610 averaging 54 seconds for a 4 by 6 and 1:40 for an 8 by 10. The EasyShare 5300 was a lot closer to the Canon AIOs' speeds for photos than for business applications, averaging 1:02 for 4-by-6s and 1:52 for 8-by-10s.

Output quality was also essentially the same for the MP610 and MP600, with the two earning nearly identical ratings, item by item, on all but one criterion. In fact, the scores differed by no more than you would expect from two of the same model printer.

The MP610's photo quality is a strong point, just a small step below the best ink jet printers or professional photo labs. Every photo in our tests qualified as true photo quality, at least as good as—and in many cases better than—you would expect from photos from your local drugstore. The only issue I saw worth mention was a slight tint in a monochrome test photo, but even that was close enough to a neutral gray for most people to find it acceptable.

Text quality is good enough for most home and business use. All the standard business fonts in our test suite were easily readable at 4 points, although some needed 6 points for the characters to qualify as truly well formed. One stylized font with thick strokes needed 20 points to count as well formed, but that's typical for ink jets. Unless you have an unusual need for small fonts or need the professional look of crisp edges that lasers are known for, the MP610 should be able to handle any text you want to print.

Graphics were more than good enough for schoolwork or internal business use. They're also good enough for output meant for an important client or customer, as long as you avoid thin lines, which tend to disappear. As with most other Canon printers and AIOs, graphics that covered most of a page tended to make the paper curl, which can be annoying if you're trying to thumb through a set of pages. If you need to print large graphics, you should plan on buying a somewhat better (and more expensive) grade of paper than typical copy or multipurpose paper.

I should add that there are a few differences between the MP610 and MP600, although they're well hidden and most are nearly irrelevant in real-world use. For example, Canon claims a 31-page-per-minute (ppm) monochrome speed for the MP610 in default mode, one ppm faster than the MP600. But as our tests showed, this doesn't translate to a noticeable difference. The number of nozzles in the MP610 is also higher, at 4,608 compared with 3,584. However, the main advantage of more nozzles, in theory, would be to increase speed, which obviously hasn't happened.

Similarly, the MP610's scanner resolution is 4,800 by 9,600 pixels per inch (ppi), compared with the MP600's 2,400 by 4,800 ppi. But unless you're scanning slides or other film, anything over 1,200 ppi—and for most purposes anything over 600 ppi—is overkill. And neither AIO can scan film.

That said, there are a few small new conveniences in the MP610, most notably an auto-fix feature for printing photos from memory cards and a quick-start feature that limits the lag between when you turn MP610 on and when it's ready to print to 2 seconds. Neither new feature counts as a reason to throw out your MP600 and upgrade, but both are welcome touches. And given that no other AIO has managed to challenge the MP600's balance of speed, quality, features, and price, the MP610 is an easy pick to replace the MP600 as Editors' Choice.

Check out the Canon Pixma MP610 Photo All-In-One's test scores.

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