The success of any all-in-one printer is ultimately judged by the speed, quality and efficiency of its separate parts and Canon has gone all-out to enhance the copying, printing and scanning performance of the PIXMA MP970, which is a replacement for the MP810.

Crafted in stylish silver plastic throughout, this is a solid-bodied machine that is totally geared towards making operation as effortless as possible. Sat squarely in the centre of the lid is an 8.9cm (3.5-inch) TFT LCD display which uses an 'Easy-Scroll Wheel' to cycle through the various available options. If you find the wheel a bit unwieldy to control, then you can flip through the menu using arrow keys instead. As well as the wheel, there's a separate NAVI button which provides more refined settings for special copying and printing.

If you want to dispense with the display entirely, then once you've connected up your PC (either via a USB 2.0 lead or using the Wi-Fi settings), you can use the supplied software (Easy PhotoPrint EX for printing and copying and MP Navigator EX for scanning) to guide you through the step-by-step process. The software also incorporates new Auto Image Fix functions which will edit and improve your master copies.

Your source material can be imported either via original prints and documents or via the two memory card slots (which cover the most popular formats like SD, Compact Flash and xD-Picture Card). In addition, there's a supplied film guide which will hold six frames of 35mm film or four slides, and you can print labels for CDs and DVDs using the specialist tray that slots handily into the front of the printer. As it's PictBridge enabled, you can also print directly from digital cameras and mobile phones; but not, alas, from flash drives.

All of this is highly commendable and when you look at the printing and copying specs you can feel justifiably optimistic that you have an excellent piece of equipment here, even though the price is quite steep. Using a 7-ink system with individual cartridges, the fine-print head produces 1-picolitre ink droplets to a maximum 9,600 x 2,400dpi print resolution. The maximum scanning resolution is 4,800dpi and the use of a high-brightness white scanning LED ensures a rapid warm-up time.

Print speeds are genuinely fast, with 10x15cm colour prints whizzed out in 30 seconds, and a quoted 22ppm for colour A4 documents. However, the big disappointment is the colour discrepancy between scanned images and images printed from memory cards, PCs and digital cameras. The quality, sharpness and colour authentication of the latter is uniformly of a high standard, but scanned images were noticeably poor with colour hues several tones amiss. When you're paying above average this is a serious flaw that will have to be addressed urgently.

Despite upgrading its excellent software, providing simple to use menus and processes and operating at high speeds, the disappointing colour results when scanning leave this all-in-one sadly trailing behind the opposition.