Hart
- Comment
First thing, out of the box this printer looks great. When I started setting it up the process was extremely easy. The manual is well laid out and easily walks a non-technical individual through the steps that are required. The included CD which contains the required drivers can be used or the manual also provides a link where current versions of both the software and drivers can be downloaded. The complete process, installing the ink cartridges, software, and drivers took about 20 minutes. Part of this 20 minutes was the printer discovering that it had new firmware available, it downloaded and installed it without a hitch. This is time well spent as once completed, using it as a printer, scanner, or copier operation is smooth. The mobile app (iOS and Android) also works smooth and quick, adding the printer was painless. The whole process was simpler than any printer installation, other than another current Canon printer which uses the same software/app, I’ve done in recent years.. Reproduction quality is excellent, this thing does a beautiful job. It doesn’t matter what I send to it, documents, images, a screen capture of a map or anything else. The software does an excellent job of determining the colour correction needs to provide and great looking print without having to tweak any settings. There is a nice little program that comes with the complete driver/software installation for minor image manipulation that works and is easy to suss out. Printing out 4x6 images on the provided sample photo paper resulted in very nice prints. The colour depth and finish were excellent. Each print took about 35 seconds so not the fastest, but for a home printer this will suffice for me. ♦ ♦ ♦: I do have one problem that I am unable to get around, the printer will not see any images on an SD card inserted into the reader slot. I’ve tried formatting three different cards each as exFAT, FAT, FAT32, and even NTFS. I’ve put jpeg and tiff (formats shown as supported by the documentation) images on the various cards. then navigate through the screens to where it simply states that “Data of supported types are not saved”. I’ve had it check to see if theres a firmware update but nothing at this time. This is mystifying as all other printers I use including the other current Canon have no issues with the three cards or images that are loaded on them. I don’t use this onboard feature very often as I prefer to use image manipulation software like Photoshop rather than try to use the limited features that are typically found on printers but there are times when I just need to print a snap shot and be done with it. This is a real let down on an otherwise great home printer. Another negative is the size of colour cartridges. These things are petite. There are six in total which is why the colour reproduction is so vivid and it will also spread the load between 5 (the main black cartridge which is about double the size of the rest, is only used for B&W jobs) whereas a standard printer would use three colour cartridges. I like Canon and their printer products but these ink cartridges could be priced better. They have three size versions, normal, X large, and XX large all within the same physical cartridge. To me this means they just fill them to different levels and then charge according to the amount of ink in each version. Unfortunately, Canon doesn’t yet provide any stats on how many pages a cartridge is good for, not that I could find when searching. Printing speed isn’t the fastest but more than fast enough for average home use. The double-sided printing feature in this small of a package is nice and works well but again it’s slower when compared to larger machines. ► Where it really suffers a loss of speed is duplex printing, specifically the turnaround time between printing on the back side. ► Once the first page is printed it sits in limbo for 14 seconds before being drawn back in to print page two on the back side. ► Total time to print a two-sided colour document is 46 seconds, a very long period in today’s printer world. This wouldn’t be acceptable in an office. I was able to fit 75 sheets of standard print/copy paper into the bottom tray or about a dozen in the back mounted pop up feeder that can be used. In both cases adjustments can be made to hold different sizes of regular paper stock, envelopes, or photo paper. Canon doesnt provide any details here, how many sheets either one will hold. For printing images on photo paper, I found the top feed to be easier for setting up and centring the paper. This feeder this doesn’t work to feed several sheets at one time for scanning, sheets to be scanned need to be placed on the top glass the same as anything to be copied. Given the shortcomings listed above, especially the SD card reader not working, I’m having a hard time thinking of it as anything over a 3-star printer compared to others in it’s class.