27 out of 27 people found this review helpful.
An amazing value
Date of Review: Jun 16, 2005
The Bottom Line: Fills the average home or small offices need for fax/print/copy/scan without taxing the pocketbook!
Since I haven't owned this printer very long, this will be a preliminary review. I will make every effort to update it at a later date. When our 3 year old Epson 786EPX photo printer developed communication problems, I knew it was time for a upgrade. We were using the 786 for photo's, a 7+ year old Epson 600 for text and a 3+ year old Epson 1200u scanner. My wife complained that using the scanner and windows fax service for faxing was undesirable and I would dearly like a automatic document feeder for the scanner so A multi function seemed to fit the bill. I had always been wary of the multi function past limitations of being adequate for all but excelling in none but at ~$210, the risk seemed small. I researched the available units and came down to the Canon for cost, the HP 7310/7410 for quality. The HP's have several additional features like an on board color display but at a additional cost of $100-$200. The thing that really turned me off was that with the hp's, you have to manually swap out the photo and text ink carts. Didn't this process go out with the old Deskjet color's of 10 years ago? When the Canons price dropped ~$50, it made the decision easy. On with the review
The Unit. Medium gray in color with black and silver highlights including-
-Photo printer with 4 dye carts
-Text printer with separate black ink cart
-Standard page flat bed scanner with auto document feeder
-Full featured stand alone fax machine
What's in the package?-
Printer (Duh)
-Print head
-5 ink carts
-Small pack of 4X6 photo paper
-Phone cord
-Power cord
-Easy setup instruction sheet
-Quick start manual
-CD's for Mac and PC
What's missing?
-A printed manual (It's on CD)
-USB cable(?) What's up with printer companies not including this cable? This dates back to the day's of expensive centronics parallel cables, but USB cables are cheap and should be included with the printer!
Setup-
Removing the printer from it's box was no sweat. The unit is large but not tremendously heavy for its size. There is a bit of tape, spacers and protective plastic film to remove
before set up. Once unpacked, hook up the power, phone and US B cable and turn the unit on. The next step is to install the separate print head which entails opening up the machine. The head and carts are deep in the center of the machine, but the printer design makes access fairly easy. The ink carts are next, take care to keep your fingers away from the ink outlets after you remove the packing seal lest you get a bit on your hands (red and yellow for me :) ). Close up the machine load up some plain paper wait a few minutes till it says Calibrate and press OK. The machine pauses for a bit then prints up a page of gray and blue blocks and you're good to go. Once you install the software, you will be able to finish the setup by inputting your fax data and configuring the many functions, all accomplished through the front panel. Though straight forward, I would have liked to seen an alternate PC based application for this configuration process.
Paper handling-
The printer has 2 paper paths. There's a office copy machine type cassette under the unit accessible from the front of the machine and a more traditional for home machines vertical slot in the rear of the machine. The printer can handle up to 150 sheets of plain paper or
10 sheets of heavier stock in either "path". I use the cassette for plain paper and the slot for photo paper, card stock, etc.. The printer can make 2 sided documents by printing one side into the print tray then sucking it back up and printing the other side. One limitation is that the scanners ADF can only scan one side, so you will have to manually turn over the page to copy a 2 sided document. Why can't my $200 printer do what the $10k copier at work can do? :) A cool function, the door that covers the printer tray and doubles as the completed work basket can be closed but will open on its own when the printer is active. No curled up sheets or jams due to forgetting to open the door.
The controls and ports-
The control panel is a curved affair at the front of the machine just below the scanner platen. Central is a yellow back lit monochrome LCD that displays the status, ink quantities and function selected. Above it are the main function buttons for print, fax, scan and picture capture modes. Below are the Black and Color fax send buttons. To the right of the screen are the dialing touch pad, menu navigation controls and several function buttons. To the left of the screen are the 8 frequent call buttons and assorted function buttons. The panel is logically laid out and the buttons are widely spaced. While the screen and selected are back lit, non of the other buttons are. The included stick on labels for the frequent call buttons are impossibly small, a larger paper label protected by a clear plastic cover would have been preferable. There are ports for power, phone and USB on the back and for a pictbrige equipped camera on the front. Also on the front of the machine is a button to manually open the printed document tray, needed to get access to the ink carts. There are several movable doors including the sheet feeder on the back, a flip up ADF door, scanner platen door and the mentioned printed document door. Missing is any form of card reader. If you want to print directly from a digital camera and don't have a pictbridge capable camera, look elsewhere.
Software-
-Scan gear Starter,. This is the interface for the driver. It's logically laid out and having a preview screen with some image adjustment tools and 2 tabs. The first is a "Simple Mode" setup with four entries for document type, preview image display, output size as well as a scan button. The Advanced tab allows for much more detailed scanner control.
-MP Navigator. This seems to be a limited scanning desktop allowing organization and retrieval of scans. From all indication, its functions are mirrored by the more complete Pagemanager software.
-Presto Pagemanager 6.03. A document organization tool similar to Paperport. I haven't used Pagemanager since version 1.0. It appears to mimic the Paperport version 10 I use almost feature for feature with a more pleasing looking IMHO interface. It has limited picture editing, OCR and annotation tools.
-Omnipage SE. An OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. Through the years I have found very little need for an OCR so I can't comment on its speed or accuracy, but Omnipage has long been considered a leader in this field. This should prove to be a better OCR than the one built into Pagemanager.
-Easy Photo Print. This is a really useful app for printing pictures. It makes printing on different paper stock or for me more importantly, printing multiple pictures on one 9X11 sheet very easy.
-Manuals. Included on disk are the full manuals for the printer and all included software.
Performance-
The machine is extremely quiet for a home use printer. For print functions, with the exception of a few clicks by the paper handling mechanisms, the unit is silent. The ADF and scan light make some noise, but much less then the Epson scanner they replaced. I can't quantify the speed of the device beyond saying it prints and scans much faster than my old Epson stuff but much slower than the $10k+ printer/copiers at work. Double sided printing is very useful but does take somewhat longer as the machine waits a bit for the ink to dry on the first printed side before sucking it back up to print the other side. As with all printers, the stated print times are totally fictitious. Quality of the print and scans have all exceeded my expectations. The ADF works as advertised but the resulting scan may be a bit crooked. Fine for the average paper document, but I would use the flatbed for critical pictures. As a stand alone fax, this unit works as well as any I've used. Place the document in the ADF, dial your number and press a button (I've yet to see a color fax, but this unit can do it). I can't comment on the pictbridge interface because I don't have a pictbridge camera. I also always upload my pictures to my PC for editing before printing. A multi format USB card reader can be had for $10 or less these days so the omission of one in the printer is a non issue to me.
***UPDATE***
This issue was pointed out to me as I only use the copy function for quick non critical draft items. When making a copy, there is a small area on the left side facing that is not printed. For most copied material, this will not be noticed and setting image enlargement to 99% will print the entire document albeit at a slightly reduced size. Scans are edge to edge and regular printing does not appear to be affected. This small issue does not change my opinion of the product which has so far performed flawlessly for me. If making 100% perfect copies is critical to you, this printer may not be your best choice.
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Conclusion-
-Overall, at $210 this is an amazing deal on what is a decent small office copier/fax/printer. For the average home user, this should meet all your scan/fax/printing needs for years to come.
