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June 26, 2006
Canon PIXMA MP830 All-in-One a Terrific Office Tool
I recently purchased the Canon PIXMA MP830 All-in-One Printer/Scanner/Fax/Copier and, after a few weeks of use, have been thoroughly impressed.
One of the features that initially caught my attention is the MP830's duplex (two-sided) scanning, copying, and printing. I do a lot of scanning paper documents to PDF, and having to manually collate the PDF pages of two-sided originals gets old in a hurry. The MP830's duplex function works like a charm. Sure, it adds a few seconds to each page as it sends it through for a second pass, but the paper handling has been rock solid so far.
You can read the MP830's specs a lot of places, so I won't bother with them here, but suffice it to say that it offers just about everything you could want in a multi-function device: color LCD for menus and photo previews, borderless photo printing, PictBridge, card reader slots, two paper sources, flatbed AND auto document feed for scanning, and, above all, duplex paper handling (the only function duplex doesn't work in is faxing). The MP830 isn't networkable, but sharing the printer through a PC's USB connection makes it accessible to everyone on the LAN.
A very nice borderless 4x6 photo print takes less than 30 seconds to emerge, and scanning a stack of 10 double-sided pages into Acrobat takes only a minute or so. The speed is impressive.
Perhaps the thing that makes this printer especially tremendous is that you only have to spend about $260 (or less) for all this functionality! I got mine from Newegg.com, who even shipped it for free (which is a good thing since this is one heavy box!).
I came from a long line of HP printers (still own two of them). I wish I had found the Canon sooner; similarly spec'ed HP multi-function printers cost more while providing (in my opinion) much crappier software (HP Director is just awful!) and cartridge problems that border on fraudulent. The Canon uses dedicated cartridges for each color and black, meaning, for example, that if you print a bunch of letterheads with blue logos and your cyan cartridge runs out, you only need to replace that one, which is much cheaper than replacing all three colors as you're forced to do with HP units. In my opinion, the control panel layout of the MP830 puts HP's all-in-ones to shame, too.
So, if you're interested in a very competent and reasonably priced printer/fax/scanner/copier multi-function, I'd strongly recommend the Canon PIXMA MP830 all-in-one. Just make sure you have a spare USB2.0 cable handy (or pick one up), as one isn't included with the printer.