Although the Canon Pixma MX340 Wireless Office All-in-One Printer ($99.99 direct) is limited in some ways—with a low paper capacity, no Ethernet connector, and relatively slow speed—it offers far more than you would probably expect for the price.

The MX340 earns the right to add Office to its name with a combination of better-than-par text quality for an inkjet and a useful set of office-centric features. In addition to printing, scanning, and copying, it can both fax from a PC and work as a standalone fax machine, and its 30-page automatic document feeder (ADF) makes it easy to scan, fax, and copy multipage documents as well as scan legal-size pages, which are too big to fit on the flatbed.

The printer can also scan to (but not print from) a USB memory key, which can be a welcome convenience.One other potentially useful touch is that you can set it to save faxes to memory, and then manually move the faxes to a USB key as PDF files to read on screen before you decide whether to print them. Unfortunately, however, if the printer loses power, you’ll lose all the faxes you haven’t yet moved to a USB key, so although this is a superficially attractive feature, it could be dangerous to use if you can’t afford to lose a fax you aren’t aware of.

Complementing its suitability for a home office, the MX340 offers some features that make it a good choice for home use as well. It lacks memory card slots, but it can print directly from PictBridge cameras. It includes menu commands to print various forms, including lined notebook paper and graph paper suitable for school and blank forms for weekly and monthly schedules.

Setting up the Pixma MX340 for printing over a USB cable is reasonably typical for an inkjet MFP. First find a spot for the 11- by 20.6- by 18.2-inch (HWD) printer, remove the packing materials, and connect the supplied telephone cord. Then connect the power cord, install the two ink cartridges (one black and one tricolor), load paper, run the automated installation program from disc, and plug in the supplied USB cable when the installation program tells you to.

I installed the printer on a system running Windows Vista. There are no additional drivers available from Canon’s Web site.

The MX340 does a little better on photo speed relative to the competition. Even for photos, however, it’s easy to find faster printers in the MX340′s price range. As with most printers, the MX340 had a problem with thin lines in some graphics, but the problem was much less serious than with most printers.

Canon’s one-year warranty for the Canon MX340 counts as a small plus. Canon says that if it can’t fix a problem by phone, it will ship a replacement printer along with a prepaid return shipping label, with Canon picking up the shipping costs in both directions.

If you don’t mind the cost per page or the slow speed, however, it’s otherwise a highly attractive printer, with a balance of office-centric features, WiFi for easy sharing, and high-quality output—particularly for photos—that has little competition for the price.