Canon Pixma

by Anne Duboise
(Ottawa, Canada)

Canon PIXMA MP610 is the best printer I have worked with so far. You see, I work as a legal secretary and I have to contend with a lot of printing and scanning jobs. I hated our old HP L7680 All-in-One, because it could not cope with the workload when you needed it most.

It is a good thing the boss realized this and came to his senses soon enough. It was causing the whole office a lot of stress because the whole piece of junk was not giving us good prints the way it should. The HP was good for light loads but it all too soon showed its true color when the going got tough. No surprise really, because the boss bought it cheap at less than $200.

Just the same, you cannot be a legal office and ask clients to use hard to read contracts for their deals, would you?

Well anyway, I would like to give a review of our new Canon PIXMA MP610. In fact, I would like to sing praises about it. I know it is different than the HP AIO despite the lack of a fax feature but who cares for fax when you can e-mail them instead?

For starters, this one really got me going fast enough because installing it was a breeze. It only took me about 10 minutes since the install disk being pretty quick and easy. Mac connection took only 2 minutes and once installation of the software in my PC was through, the printer was up and running. As for the old HP, it seems like ages before it finishes with its testing.

At first, I had my doubts about it because I had the impression from Canon advertisement that it was mainly a photo printer. I do not have much use for the photo printer because some other guy at our office find it useful and he is not disappointed with the photo outputs either. I saw some of his photos and they look superb, with the images looking all sharp and vibrant with color.

As far as my line of work is concerned, I can photocopy and do scanning jobs without feeling stressed out. I can hand over the outputs to be used by clients without having to be apologetic for taking too long.

Now here is the fun part, the printer navigation is way out cool since all options are displayed in a bright LCD that simply flips up where you can see the navigation wheel and all of the great little buttons. Everyday printing of documents goes on without hassles and I can attest to the fact that it does have the ability to print at 31 pages per minute if you are in the mono mode and 24 pages per minute using the color mode.

This Canon printer allows me to print on both sides because it has the automatic duplex feature, but Iam quite selective when using this feature. Based on my experience with the HP double-sided printing, the printer does have to wait a while for the first side to dry before it goes on to the next side.

Overall, using this printer is really quite painless because I can use different types of paper. I must admit though that the machine has its low points too. I find the machine too large for our workspace especially if we all have to work with it all at the same time.

Another thing is that you cannot use another type of cartridge other than Canon. We tried a different brand of cartridge once and it did not work out because the printer does not recognize the cartridges.

Its indicator kept sending out messages that the ink cartridges were empty. It is no big deal really since Canon cartridges are economical by standards anyway.

All in all my assessment of Canon PIXMA MP610 is that it is great. Nowadays, I do not lag behind as far as printing, scanning and photocopying of documents are concerned. Work is always done quickly and efficiently.