A love and hate relationship

The day my old printer quit on me was a blessing in disguise. I have four computers in my house and having to attach a printer via USB to one computer and share it was a pain. The computer that hosted the printer would suffer whenever someone needed to print and I had to keep that computer on at all times in order to print from another computer. That may have been the way to do business in the 90’s but there is a much better way of handling this situation with today’s technology. Network printing allows me to connect the Canon MX700 to my router and print and scan from any computer on my network.

I bought the MX700 to handle routine printing and scanning needs for the house; I am not interested in the faxing or photo printing capabilities of the MX700. With that being said, I was very pleased with how easy it was to install the printer on my home network. The network instruction guide was easy to understand and follow. The only thing to note is the first computer you install the MX700 on for network use you must use a USB cable, but after that all that is needed is the installation disk for consecutive computers. I was blown away at how well the installation disk worked on a Windows 2000 SP4, Windows XP SP2, and Windows Vista Home SP1 systems. A final note is my firewall, Zone Alarm, did not cause any problems with the setup and use of the network printer.

One of my computers is connected to my router via cat5 cable, all of the rest are wireless via the 802.11g standard and I am very pleased with the print speed. When my wife hits the print button on her computer I hear the printer spitting out her document seconds later. The printer text is clear and crisp and I would not hesitate to print a resume on this printer. A nice surprise was the fact that you can scan to any computer and scan to PDF; which I feel is important now days. My daughter can place a document or picture on the scanner (flat bed or automatic document feeder) and using the Canon scan utility scan the image to her computer. This way she does not have to use a specific computer or a USB drive to move the information.

I have owned this all-in-one for a few months now and I am generally pleased with the whole package. There are a couple of things that drives me nuts about the MX700.

The Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) is a great addition to any computer because it allows you to put a stack of papers in the feeder and the MX700 will scan each and every page. I didn’t have any problems with the ADF jamming or missing pages what drove me nuts is the pages were all slightly crooked. I feel Canon could either correct that problem within the ADF itself or through the software. Pages scanned on the flat bed did not have any issues.

I wish that this model support full-duplex scanning and printing. What full-duplex does is it will allow you to print on both sides of a piece of paper and allow you to scan both sides. Canon does have a work around but that entails you to print/scan one side then manually flip it over to print/scan the other.
***2 Oct 08 Update***
A major complaint that I had with the Canon MX700 was when using the ADF to scan multiple documents the scan copies would be slanted.
I've had more time to use the ADF and I made a mistake with my post. There is two options to correct the slant and they are called; "Detect the orientation of text documents and rotate images" and "Correct slanted documents."
Both options are not selected by default. To find these selection start up the Canon utility and select "Scan/Import photos or documents," then select "Stack of documents (ADF)." Once you've scanned your pile of papers click on "Save to PDF." On the right hand side there will be a button called "Set..." click on that to find the two options to correct the slant on the documents.
On a 35 page document (I had to scan it in two parts) I encountered no jams or problems, also when I selected both options to correct for slants the output was great; not perfect though. Most pages looked straight with only a few that were off kilter.