Canon imageCLASS MF249dw Wireless, Multifunction, Duplex Laser Printer

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Warning: Ive only owned this printer for a few days so Im not able to provide information about its long term reliability. Frequently you only begin to find issues with a product after having owned it for some time. That said, ... I was in the market for a multi-function wireless printer to replace two existing wired printers (a multi-function color inkjet and a laser), both dependable but showing their age. I briefly considered getting a color printer but finally decided against it owing to both the cost of the printer itself and the total cost of ownership (colored inks for both inkjet and laser are expensive). I knew I wanted laser because theyre generally faster but mainly because, again, long term costs seem better. After considering a bewildering number of reviews on both the internet and on Amazon specifically I finally chose this printer; it edged out other printers in Amazon reviews, but not by much. Surprisingly, just about every printer I looked at had only mediocre reviews, often with high disappointment scores. Maybe thats just part and parcel of the territory. I was able to unbox the printer and have it operating in less than an hour, perhaps closer to half an hour. I ignored the instructions (Im a guy, thats what we do), never installed the CD (another guy foible), but was able to get it connected to my router painlessly - if you ignore the tedium of typing mixed case letters, numbers, and special characters on the control pad. Since then, Ive tried single-sided printing, double-siding (aka, duplex) printing, single and double-sided scanning, single and double-sided copying, but not faxing (I have VOIP, which faxing machines treat like an unknown foreign language). I have also successfully printed from my iPad (single and double sided). All these functions worked without a hitch. Honestly, Im so accustomed to things failing to work as advertised I find myself still holding my breath for the moment when something finally goes wrong. Fingers crossed, it wont. The printer is a bit bulky, but I have a decent place for it. Its a lot easier to find a place when youre not tethered to the device by a USB cord. Its in the same room where my computer and router live, so the connection is pretty strong; not sure if there would be any issue with a weaker connection. It comes with a half capacity toner cartridge, good for about 1700 pages as I recall. Before running tests I first upgraded the firmware from the control panel, which is fairly painless. Nice feature, that. There are a few things Im not crazy about. It feels a bit plastic-y. The control panel, especially the touch screen, is not the best around. Getting the printer to print single-sided requires diligence - its not HARD to do, but the printer seems like it prefers double-sided printing by default so you have to be certain when printing that you select single-sided in whatever print dialog confronts you. Im not crazy about the way you load paper, by stuffing it into an open mouth. Im used to pulling out a tray, loading paper, then reinserting the tray. Stuffing paper just feels prone to causing problems with dog ears, skews, and possible jams. Also, I wish the mouth held more sheets of paper than it does. In general, the printed pages look good to me. This is for home use, so Im not looking for fancy graphic capability or high resolution printing, though I do recall stumbling across a configuration page that provides a setting for higher resolution. Overall, Im pretty happy with my choice so far. I rarely, if ever, give a product 5 stars. It really has to hit a home run with bases loaded for me to grant 5 stars. But I doubt that Id find a better printer at the price. Note that there are a couple of Canon imageCLASS printers in the MF24x line. I think theyre all fairly similar, only a feature or two is missing from the 244 and 247, like duplex printing, and/or faxing capability, so Id expect those printers to work about as well as this one with their respective feature set.

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I got this printer on Prime Day for $150 ... awesome price point! We needed another All-in-One printer as our last one wore out. I wanted something useful for a home office. I had been shopping for a few weeks, and I insisted this time that our household get a laser-based AIO printer (e.g., household members had purchased inkjet AIO printers in the past). I selected this Canon model, because it does everything (scan, fax, duplexing copying, duplex printing). I also looked closely at the Brother 2700 models (but they were not on sale). After looking, I realized that some AIO printers do not fax or scanning (just printing and copying) which is misleading many here. Well I finally selected this model because it clearly does everything, and the 2nd market replacement toner cartridges are only $25. This is not a cheaply built AIO printer. It is 30 pounds and solid. The initial unpacking and set up took about 1 hour. I opted to network the printer, so it could be placed anywhere in our home. Therefore, I had to install the Canon software (for scanning, faxing) on multiple PCs. However, no glitches in the set up process. The first page out takes 3 to 6 seconds (even from downstairs or on the patio). The only minor complaint that I might have about this model is that it does not have supplemental paper trays (e.g., larger or modified) ... however this is NOT a big deal. Overall, a very good printer. I was going to give this thing 4 stars, but I am giving it 5 stars because of the Amazon special price.

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I opened this up yesterday and was messing with it for quite awhile getting all my machines hooked up and learning how to use it properly. Im mostly pleased with this printer so far, without a caveat about the duplex scanning. Two things about me: I havent owned an all-in-one laser printer like this before and I am a computer networking guy, so that part was easy for me. On the networking, I plugged it into the network, downloaded install software from the canon website for this model (all-in-one software AND scanner utility), installed, it found the printer, good to go. My iPhone also found it, but it took two tries for it to find on both my iPhone and my wifes, hardly worth mentioning because it worked so quick. I installed on my PC and my wifes mac (without scanner utility at this point, looks like scanning works a bit different on the mac) and tested all machines successfully. It is very finicky with the duplex scanning - some papers it can do it, others that arent perfectly flat, straight, not wrinkled etc its just not going to happen and will jam every time. Also, in order to enable duplex scanning, you need the scanner utility installed on your machine, go into settings, and Document Scan (to the left) check "Scan both sides when scanning from the feeder." I havent played with many other settings, but there appear to be lots of options here. With documents that you dont want to send through the ADF, you can use the tray and that is quick as well. The scanner utility makes this easy to scan multiple pages for because at the end it asks you if there are more documents to scan (and it will keep going as needed) or if its done. Scanning from both the auto document feeder and the tray are very fast and Im exceedingly pleased with this! Ill be clearing out a cabinet of files that I dont need hard copies of anymore and this looks like it will do it pretty quickly. I will say that some of the files have come out a little crooked, but Im not sure if thats a problem with how Im placing them or with the scanner itself. Printing is also quick and looks good; I am quite pleased with that. Duplex printing tested with no problems and was quick. I was looking for an all-in-one laser printer with Auto Document Feeder, duplex printing AND duplex scanning, networked with a wired connection (this does have wireless also) and this has fit the bill nicely so far!

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Everything I wanted. Its full duplex, both the scanner and the printer for saving paper when you print. No more manually reinserting the pages, especially when you are printing just a couple pages like a website. Wifi is nice in that you can put it anywhere in your home that is near an electrical socket. The benefit of a laser printer is it will pretty much always works until you print ten of thousands of pages and then need to replace the drum. Toner doesnt dry up like ink in inkjets do so when you really do need to print you can. I only print occasionally so limiting myself to black and paying just a little more for the printer is actually saving me money. If I need to print photos I can go to a Kinkos. I can always get a color inkjet or laser in the future if I really need one but this one will be the workhorse.

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I got this laser printer because my inkjet used so much ink. It was a color printer, but wasted a lot of ink. This is not color. Prints clearly. I suggest you use laser paper, or it jams when double-siding. It always prints one side crooked when it double-sides, the other side is straight. Therefore I did not give it 5 stars v

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Canon MF-249dw review. A little background. I started with Epson printers in 1986, about the same time Bill Gates was in a garage. Ive seen them all, "Dot Matrix" black, dot matrix color, then many, many "Ink Jets", mostly Epson, since they were there in the beginning. The inkjets all clog up after time and elaborate cleaning procedures are very messy. Finally, the latest ink head clogs on both of my Epsons pushed me over the edge, to consider a LASER! The Canon MF-249dw arrived yesterday and I am impressed. Packaging is great, but when removing tape and setup was done, I printed some test sheets. Wow! The speed and clarity is amazing. The pages shot out almost as soon as my finger was off the "print" button. Double sided is about 5 seconds longer. To me, it is almost unbelievable. Ill NEVER go back. In time, I may look at the color version. To sum it up, Hoo-Ray!, no more clogged nozzles or expensive (theyre getting worse) cartridges! These Toner Cartridges will last me "forever". Ill update, if needed.

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This is an excellent photocopier, I use it to make copies for my classes. I often print out several sets of 60 copies at a time. You can do double sided copies. I use non brand name ink that I found here on Amazon and have had no problems with it. I have also never experienced a paper jam. This makes copies fairly quickly, although when you are printing individual documents there tends to be a delay between pages. You can fit a good amount of paper into the paper tray and it has a feeder on top, which is why I chose it over some cheaper models. Also the wireless capability was important to me. The only thing I wish was different is that the panel with the buttons pulls out at an angle, but doesnt stay open. So you have to hold it when you press the buttons. Also I noticed that condensation builds up under this panel when I do a lot of copies. Although it doesnt seem to be causing any problems, it just seems weird. I owned the previous model of this and it seems exactly the same, the only reason I replaced it was because my original got fried in a power surge. So I recommend buying the protection plan for a few extra dollars.

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So far, Im not as happy with this as I expected to be. After twelve years, my workhorse HP laser printer (which I bought used) gave up the ghost. This Canon came highly recommended, and had a couple of extra features that made it seem like a good replacement. All was fine until it refused to play nicely to print envelopes with postage from the Stamps.com software. I spent two hours each with both Stamps.com and Canon. The first mistake I made was using the disk that came with the printer to install. I was told the drivers were old on the disk. Well, why provide a disk? Why not tell people instead to download the current driver and not let them install ones that are dated? Secondly, the only way to get it to print envelopes was to create a special setting - which now means that envelopes are the default, rather than letter size paper. After a total of four hours on the phone with both Stamps.com and Canon, I found my own workaround for printing envelopes, but am still stuck with envelopes as my default paper size.

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I installed the printer today and so far Im very happy with it. Since its close to my FiOS router, I connected it with a network cable and it was immediately visible on all my computers thank you to the WSD protocol. No USB cable needed for print and scan, no lengthy setup process on the PCs: it worked right out of the box. You need a USB connection only if you want to push the scan from the MF to the PC, but that was expected. Setting up the scan-to-mail took me a bit longer, because I could not find the SMTP port settings (my provider uses SSL and port 587 as opposed to the standard port 25). It turned out that the SMTP port setting was in a separate "port configuration" section of the settings, instead of being together with the other scan-to-mail settings. Once this was fixed, the scan to mail worked great, I love the fact that you can assign speed dials to send a scan to your most used mailboxes so it only takes a single push of a button to scan to your email. You can also customize the entire touch panels menu and put your most used functions on the first of the 4 pages available, for faster access. The print quality is very good and so is the quality of the scanned pictures, both operations are also quite fast.I love the automatic duplex printing and scanning. Scanning from the sheet feeder is fast enough, although the scans are not perfectly straight when taken from the feeder... maybe I need to use thicker paper, Ill experiment a little bit. I could setup Google Cloud Print in just a few minutes... but it doesnt work! After searching on the Web for hours, I found out that its a known issue with several printer brands, who did not implement the GCP standard properly. The setup works, but the printer keeps showing offline on the Google Cloud website and you cannot print anything from it, no matter how many times you reinstall the printer and try to reconnect it. Canon printers seem to be the worst one for this issue, so dont buy this printer if Google Cloud Printing is a must for you. You can still use GCP when a connected PC is running (it kind of defeats the purpose of GCP, though). On the other hand, air print works perfectly on all my Apple devices, I did not have to setup anything, it just worked when I turned the printer on. There is also a "direct connection" feature that you can use with your guests: the printer acts as an access point and the guests PC can connect to it without the need to share your Wi-Fi password. Overall, its a great printer with a lot of useful features and a minor flaw (the faulty Google Cloud Print) which I hope will be fixed at some point with a firmware upgrade.

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I seldom write poor reviews. But, this printer is absolutely horrible. I would gladly pay money not to have wasted my time on this printer. It continually goes offline, is not reliable...I cant count the number of times Ive had to run to my office to print things off because this printer wouldnt work. It simply will not connect to the internet at all times (it needs to be connected to your wireless network to work--there is no manual way to print something off of a USB stick). Sometimes it will work , sometimes it wont. It will work for a month. Then, wont work for 2 weeks. For example, yesterday I printed off a return label. Then a couple of hours later, I tried to print a time sensitive letter--it would not print. I turned it off, reconnected to the internet, verified the IP address---Nothing, nothing, nothing--1.5 hrs wasted. Then, this morning, as I am walking out the door, it prints off the document 20 hours later....

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