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Canon Pixma MX452 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer

M. David Stone
 & M. David Stone Contributing Editor

Our team tests, rates, and reviews more than 1,500 products each year to help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.

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Canon Pixma MX452 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer - Canon Pixma MX452 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer
3.0 Average

The Bottom Line

The Canon Pixma MX452 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer can serve in the dual role of home and home office MFP or as a personal MFP in any size office.

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Pros & Cons

    • Prints and faxes from, as well as scans to, a PC.
    • Standalone copier and fax.
    • Automatic document feeder.
    • Wi-Fi.
    • No wired network support.
    • Slow.

Canon Pixma MX452 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer Specs

Color or Monochrome 1-pass color
Connection Type USB
Connection Type Wireless
Cost Per Page (Color) 13.8 cents
Maximum Scan Area 8.5" x 14"
Maximum Standard Paper Size Legal
Number of Ink Colors 4
Scanner Optical Resolution 1200 pixels per inch
Scanner Type Flatbed
Standalone Copier and Fax Copier
Standalone Copier and Fax Fax
Type All-in-one
All Specs

As its name implies, the Canon Pixma MX452 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer ($297.49 at Amazon) is one of a relatively few multifunction printers (MFPs) in its price range designed more for office, rather than home, needs. The focus shows up in office-centric features ranging from its fax capability to its automatic document feeder (ADF). That doesn't mean you can't get it strictly for home use, but it does mean its best fit is in the dual role of home and home-office printer or simply as a personal printer in any size office.

Like the Brother MFC-J430w, the Editors' Choice in this category and a head-to-head competitor, the MX452 prints from, scans to, and faxes from a PC, and also works as a standalone copier and fax machine. As with most MFPs aimed at office use, its ADF supplements a letter-size flatbed, with the ADF handling multipage documents and legal-size pages. The ADF also one-ups the MFC-J430w a bit, with a higher input capacity, at 30 pages. One other nice touch is the ability to scan to (but not print from) a USB memory key.

As with the MFC-J430w, the MX452 lacks an Ethernet connector, but offers Wi-Fi, so you can share the printer on a network. Except for the dual role of home and home-office printer, however, it's best limited to strictly personal use because of the same limited paper handling as the Brother printer, with a 100-sheet tray, no duplexer, and no upgrade options. Also worth mention is that the MX452 supports AirPrint. However you can't connect directly to use AirPrint. Both the printer and your phone or tablet have to connect through a Wi-Fi access point on your network.

Setup, Speed, and Output Quality
Setting up the MX452 was standard fare. For my tests, I connected it to a Windows Vista system using a USB cable. Speed, unfortunately, turned out to be a little slow.

Canon Pixma MX452 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer I timed the printer on our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing) at an effective 2.1 pages per minute (ppm). That's not an unusually slow speed for the price range, with the similarly priced Epson WorkForce WF-2530 scoring only 2.6 ppm, for example. However, the MFC-J430w is more than twice as fast, at 4.3 ppm. Photo speed was also sluggish in absolute terms, but typical for the price, averaging 2 minutes 9 seconds for a 4 by 6.

The good news is that the MX452 scores much better on output quality than speed. Text quality in my tests was better than the vast majority of inkjet MFPs can manage, which makes it good enough for most business purposes.

Graphics output was par for an inkjet MFP, making it good enough for any internal business need up to and including PowerPoint handouts and the like. Depending on how critical an eye you have, you may consider the graphics good enough for output going to an important client or customer. Photos qualified as par quality also, but just barely. That translates to true photo quality, but roughly a match for the worst you would expect from drugstore prints.

In most ways, the Canon Pixma MX452 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer is a capable personal MFP that can go toe-to-toe with the Brother MFC-J430w. Its one shortcoming is its speed, which makes the Brother printer the better choice for most offices. On the other hand the Canon printer offers slightly better graphics output and at least one notable convenience that the MFC-J430w lacks, namely, the ability to scan to a USB memory key. If that's more important to you than speed, the MX452 may be the better fit. It's certainly a reasonable choice in any case.

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Final Thoughts

Canon Pixma MX452 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer - Canon Pixma MX452 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer

Canon Pixma MX452 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer Review

3.0 Average

The Canon Pixma MX452 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer can serve in the dual role of home and home office MFP or as a personal MFP in any size office.

Get It Now

Buy It Now

About Our Expert

M. David Stone

M. David Stone

Contributing Editor

My Experience

Most of my current work for PCMag is about printers and projectors, but I've covered a wide variety of other subjects—in more than 4,000 pieces, over more than 40 years—including both computer-related areas and others ranging from ape language experiments, to politics, to cosmology, to space colonies. I've written for PCMag.com from its start, and for PC Magazine before that, as a Contributor, then a Contributing Editor, then as the Lead Analyst for Printers, Scanners, and Projectors, and now, after a short hiatus, back to Contributing Editor.

I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who worked on every "Project Printer" blockbuster PCMag ever produced, often writing 15 or more reviews for the year's big printer blowout. (I snuck in a single review one year when I was writing a book, strictly so I could keep that claim alive.)

I've always worked for PCMag as a freelancer, which has freed me to take time away to write nine books, be a major contributor to four others, and write for other publications, including Wired, Computer Shopper, Projector Central, and Science Digest, where I was Computers Editor. I also wrote a computer column at one point for The Newark Star-Ledger.

Although I started my career primarily as a science (mostly physics and astronomy) and science-fiction writer (published in Analog), my non-computer-related work runs the gamut from the Project Data Book for NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (written for GE's Astro-Space Division) to the script for a video overview of a top company in the gaming industry (that would be gambling, not video games). My books include The Underground Guide to Color Printers (Addison-Wesley), Troubleshooting Your PC (Microsoft Press), and Faster, Smarter Digital Photography (Microsoft Press).

Having covered a wide range of subjects, I've developed a serial expertise in many of them. The ones most relevant to my current work at PCMag.com are all imaging technologies.

The Technology I Use

I buy new PCs for my writing desk infrequently, because it takes a week or more to customize the settings the way I want them. At the moment, I have an HP Envy tower running Windows 10, but it's old enough to have a Windows 7 sticker on it. Its latest lease on a longer life is courtesy of a newly installed 500GB Samsung SSD 870 EVO.

Elsewhere in my house is an assortment of older and newer PCs. The older ones are dedicated to specific tasks, like the one I've been using to slowly digitize all the paper stored in my filing cabinets, while the newer ones are testbeds for printer and projector reviews.

For writing, I use Microsoft Word 2003, because I find it too annoying to take my hands off the keyboard to give mouse commands using the Ribbon. My workhorse printers are a Xerox Phaser 6280 color laser and a Dymo LabelWriter 450 Twin Turbo for labels and stamps. I also have a Canon Pixma iP8720 for printing photos, and a Canon ImageFormula DR-C225 for scanning.

My first computer was bought to replace my IBM Selectric for writing. After rejecting both the IBM PC (which had just been introduced) and the Apple II because of the keyboards, I chose a Vector Graphics Vector 3 CP/M machine with dual floppies. The first MS-DOS machine I was willing to use for writing was the IBM AT, with its much-improved keyboard compared with the original PC and its gargantuan 20MB hard drive.

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