PCMag editors select and review products independently. If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our testing.

PCMag UK

Canon Pixma MX472 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.

Our Expert
LOOK INSIDE PC LABS HOW WE TEST
65 EXPERTS
43 YEARS
41,500+ REVIEWS
Canon Pixma MX472 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer - All-in-One Printers
3.0 Average

The Bottom Line

The Canon Pixma MX472 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer offers a full set of MFP features in a personal inkjet printer.

Buy It Now

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 MX472 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 Legal
Maximum Standard Paper Size Legal
Number of Ink Colors 4
Scanner Optical Resolution 1200 pixels per inch
Scanner Type Flatbed with ADF (Standard or Optional)
Standalone Copier and Fax Copier
Standalone Copier and Fax Fax
Type All-in-one
All Specs

Best understood as a minor upgrade to, and variation on, the Canon Pixma MX452 Wireless Office All-in-One Printer($297.49 at Amazon), the Canon Pixma MX472 Wireless Office All-in-One Printer ($99.99), is one of only a few multifunction printers (MFPs) in its price range that's aimed more at office rather than home use. That's not to say you can't use it at home, but you may not need some of its office-centric features, like its fax capability. On the other hand, it's a good fit as a personal printer in any size office or in the dual role of home and home-office printer.

Like the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J430w, which is discontinued but still available online at this writing, the Pixma MX472($249.95 at Amazon) can print and fax from, as well as scan to, a PC, and it can work as a standalone copier and fax machine. For scanning, it offers both a letter-size flatbed and a 30-page automatic document feeder (ADF), which can scan at up to legal size. Somewhat disappointingly, it lacks the ability to scan to a USB key, which is one of the welcome extras that the Canon MX452 offers.

As with the Brother MFC-J430w and Canon MX452, the Pixma MX472 lacks an Ethernet connector but offers Wi-Fi so you can connect to a network. Except for the dual role of home and home-office printer, however, it's unlikely that you'll want to share it on a network because of its limited paper handling. The capacity is a meager 100 sheets, with no duplexer and no upgrade options.

The real advantage of connecting by Wi-Fi to an access point on a network is that it lets you take advantage of the printer's Google Cloud Print support. Also under mobile printing is support for printing over a Wi-Fi connection with AirPrint or with Canon's free iOS and Android apps for printing to and scanning from the printer. In addition, Canon's Access Point mode, which is a proprietary equivalent to Wi-Fi Direct, will let you connect directly between the printer and a mobile device even if the printer isn't on a network.

Setup, Speed, and Output Quality
For my tests, I connected the Pixma MX472 to a system running Windows Vista, using a USB cable. Setup is standard fare when it works properly. However, I ran into a minor issue with a Windows Vista security feature keeping the setup program from running. At this writing, Canon is still investigating the issue, but the company came up with an easy alternative to install the driver and other software. If you run into the same issue, you should be able to get the workaround by calling Canon's tech support number.

Canon Pixma MX472 Office All-in-One Printer

The printer's speed on our tests was unimpressive. On our business applications suite (timed using QualityLogic's hardware and software), it came in at only 2.3 pages per minute (ppm), just a touch faster than the Canon MX452, at 2.1 ppm. That's not unusually slow for this price range. The Epson WorkForce WF-2530, for example, managed only 2.6 ppm. However, the Brother MFC-J430w managed nearly twice the speed, at 4.3 ppm, which is one of the reasons it's our Editors' Choice. Photo speed, similarly, was slow but typical for the price, averaging 2 minutes 3 seconds for a 4-by-6.

The printer scores a little better for output quality. Text is at the low end of a tight range where most inkjet MFPs fall, making it good enough for most business needs. Graphics output, similarly, is at the low end of standard, but easily good enough for anything up to and including PowerPoint handouts and the like. Photo quality is easily a match for what you would expect from drugstore prints.

Despite the lackluster speed, the Canon Pixma MX472 Wireless Office All-in-One Printer is a capable personal MFP for the price. Its only real shortcoming compared with the Brother MFC-J430w is speed, which keeps the Brother printer firmly in place as Editors' Choice for personal MFP and makes it the better fit for most office use. That said, the Canon printer offers more than enough to make it a good fit as a personal printer or a home and home-office printer, and it's certainly a reasonable choice.

Best Printer Picks

Further Reading

Final Thoughts

Canon Pixma MX472 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer - All-in-One Printers

Canon Pixma MX472 Wireless Office All-in-One Printer Review

3.0 Average

The Canon Pixma MX472 Wireless Office All-In-One Printer offers a full set of MFP features in a personal inkjet printer.

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.

Read the latest from M. David Stone

Read full bio