You cannot reduce or enlarge, only fit to page automatically using a button. Unhelpful controls aside, the copying options themselves are limited. You press an unlabelled button to toggle among three different media types a small light next to each shows which is chosen, but nothing indicates that this is a copying option. An LED cluster with an adjacent '+' button is not otherwise labelled, even though it has multiple roles (such as showing the number of copies, or displaying single-letter status codes), none of them obvious. The buttons labelled 'Black' and 'Color' are for copying, but the vaguer word 'Start' sits above them instead.

Even though the 'Scan' button is labelled, it's hard to find because it's the same size and colour as less-important buttons. The control panel suffers from a shortage of visual cues. The ink-cartridge bays seem carelessly designed, as their shallow slots provide minimal guidance for seating the tanks correctly. To use the machine, you pull the input slot's two-part, hinged guide up from the back, and flip the output tray from the front. The machine's breadbox-like profile looks neat, but some aspects could be improved. The cost per page (at 5 per cent coverage per colour) is reasonable: about 13 cents for black-only, or 26 cents for a page with all three colours plus black. Scans proceeded quickly and looked good overall. The images sometimes looked faded and vague on plain paper, but using Canon's own papers made everything crisper and brighter (albeit at a much higher cost). Its speed in printing various graphics ranged from 1.5 to 4.1ppm - about average overall for the category.

Letterforms looked nicely dark, but a little fuzzy at the edges - a detriment to intricate or closely spaced fonts.

It printed plain-text documents at 8.6 pages per minute (ppm). The Pixma MP210 performed competently in our tests.

Canon mp210 printer driver