Features

• 1 picoliter sized ink droplets
• PictBridge capable
• Scanner: 4800 x 9600 dpi, with 48-bit color depth
• 30 page automatic document feeder
• USB 2.0 interface
• Plug into a Network: connect to a home or office network
• Printer: up to 9600 x 2400 color dpi.
• 2 Way Paper feed: Built-in dual paper trays
• High-end faxing: Fax at up to 33.6 Kbps2 in color/B&W

One of my favorite features on modern printers is the ability to connect them to a network. A printer that can be connected to a network is very easy to share with other computers. If the printer has a fax, scanner, or other features, then those can also be shared. The MX850 has the ability to connect to a network and share all the features with any computer that is also connected to the network.

The scanner is fairly standard and provides scan resolutions of 4800 x 9600 dpi optical and 19,200 x 19,200 dpi interpolated. The output for each scan is 48-bit internal/24-bit external. The maximum document size that can be scanned is 8.5″ x 11.7″. The automatic document feeder (ADF) can be used to make scanning easier by letting you load 35 pages to scan and then walk away and come back when it is finished.

The MX850 uses only five ink cartridges, the colors are: cyan, magenta, yellow, dye-based black and a pigment-based black. The dye-based black is used for mixing with the other colors so the printer can make new colors. Without this color the printer would have a much harder time printing photos and other highly colored documents. In addition, the MX850 has 1 picoliter sized ink droplets which means the images it prints will have very fine detail.

Ink and cables

The cost of photos remains about the same. The pigment-based black cartridge costs $17.25 and the other cartridges are $14.99. One good thing is that the MX850 comes with full ink cartridges, which means you won’t have to buy new cartridges anytime soon. A light mounted on the front of each cartridge slot tells you when your cartridge is low or empty.

Ink Lights

The fax uses a built-in 33.6 Kbps (Super G3 color fax) modem. Even though it is not the fastest modem you will probably not max it out because most public telephone lines are limited to 28.8 Kbps or lower, depending on telephone line conditions. With this modem the MX850 can transmit in Color and Black and White. It takes about 3 seconds per page to send a Black and White page and about 1 minute per page for color documents. If you are sending a color pages make sure the other end also has a color fax, otherwise you are wasting your time. With the included internal memory the fax can store 100 speed-dial codes, and can store 250 pages for transmission or receiving.

Speed Dial

The copier offers a lot of useful features. It is able to copy in color and in black and white. Color is copied at about 2.5 seconds per page and Black and White is copied about 1.9 seconds per page. There are also many other features that you can use when you copy like: 4-in-1 / 2-in-1 Copy, Auto Duplex Copy, Fit-to-Page, Multiple Copy: 1-99 pages , Preset Copy Ratios and Sort. The copier also allows you to reduce and enlarge from 25% to 400%.

Design

The MX850 is very large and heavy. With dimensions of 20.0″ (W) x 19.0″ (D) x 10.2″ (H) and a weight of 30.7 lbs it is one of the largest and heaviest Canon printers.

The front of the MX850 is where you will find the controls, paper output, memory card slots, and a PictBridge connection. The controls consist of about 45 buttons which control every aspect of the printer and a small color display. Fourteen of those buttons are set aside for the Fax functionality. You have 12 for dialing numbers just like on a phone, a redial/pause, and coded dial button. The buttons to the left of the fax buttons are for accessing the menus. The buttons to the right of the fax buttons are for manually starting the copier or fax, there is a button for color and another for black and white copies and faxes. On the far left there are several buttons that determine what mode the printer is in. This mode determines what it does when you press buttons and access menus. For example, if you are in fax mode, then when you press the start button the MX850 starts sending a fax. Also, if you want a fax to be printed immediately when it is received you need to be in fax mode, otherwise it will be stored in memory. You can print and scan from your computer no matter what mode it is in. Below the mode buttons is another number pad. This one is used for setting up speed dials. This is really redundant because the buttons that are for the fax could also be used for the speed dials. The last button which is on the top left is the power button. There is nothing fancy here, it just turns the printer on and off.

Top

Right side buttons

Left side buttons

Below the control panel is the paper output tray, PictBridge connection, memory card slots, and the main paper input. When printing, the paper output tray opens up automatically which is convenient if you forget to open it yourself. The memory card slots are to the right of the paper output tray. The memory card slots consist of a CF and SD slot. With these two slots you can use up to 13 different card types. The PictBridge connection is right under the memory card area. It is standard, just plug in your camera or just about any other USB device and choose print. Under the paper output tray is the paper input cartridge. It slides all the way out for easy paper loading and can be adjusted to hold many different sizes of paper. You can load your plain paper in here and leave the rear paper tray in the back for your custom paper. Use the feed switch button on the control panel to choose where you want the paper to come from. You can also use the printer settings on your computer to override the feed switch. Both the paper input tray and the rear paper tray can hold about 150 sheets of paper.

Front

Memory slots

On the top is the Automatic Document Feeder. This will hold up to 35 pages at a time and can be used for the Fax, Scanner and Copier. Behind that is the manual paper loading tray. It is enclosed with a nice cover that when opened, the cover functions as the paper guide.

Top

On the back is the rear cover. This is a section that opens so you can clear jammed paper. On the right side of the back is the USB, Ethernet, and the phone line connection, and on the left is the power plug.

Duplexer

Connectors

Performance

When you first open the box you will notice that you will need to install some things. The main things to install are the print cartridges, and the cartridge holder. There are clear instructions on how to do this, but it is not in the manual, instead Canon put it on a separate piece of paper. I highly recommend that you pay attention to this paper and follow it closely. Once you have the ink installed you are ready to go. You don’t even need a computer to begin using the fax and copier functionality. If you want to scan and print you will first need to install the software and plug it into a computer.

Install print head 2

Install print head 4

Install Ink

You have two options for connecting the printer to your computers. The easiest way to connect the printer is to use the USB connection. However, this limits you to only one computer using the printer, but if you only have one computer then this is not a problem. If you have more than one computer then you will want to connect the MX850 to a network. To setup the network you first have to connect the printer to a computer with the USB. When you run the installer it will update the printer with the network connection information. When it is done you can disconnect the USB and use just an Ethernet cable.

Install

There is one extremely annoying thing with the driver install. When the drivers are finished installing a dialog appears that asks if you want to restart the computer to finish the install; however, there is only a yes button and if you click the x it restarts the computer anyways. Why bother asking if you don’t give a choice, and why does a computer need to restart just to install printer drivers? Hopefully you are able to save and close all your documents before you are forced to restart.

Install 2

Printing to the printer is as easy as just pushing the print button from your favorite program, but buried in many menus are a lot of configurations that will allow you to set the print quality, paper type and even do double sided printing. On a printer like this, double sided printing is a very nice feature. It is not a clearly marked feature, but you can find it if you look under the printer properties on the page setup tab — it is called Duplex Printing. If you don’t know what duplex means, then this will really confuse you because that same section talks about stapling. This printer does not include a stapler, but instead will leave a margin so that you can staple the pages later. For some reason, I don’t know why, Canon thought it would make sense to put duplex printing and stapling together. I would have preferred a simple check box that said Double Sided printing. Once you have it set up, double-sided printing works great.

Duplex option

Scanning is something you can do from the computer or from the printer. Either way it will need to be connected to a computer or else it won’t have anywhere to send the scan. You will also need to be running a program that can accept a scanned document or image. Luckily, the Canon MX850 ships with one such program, the Presto! PageManager. The quality of the scan is really good, as you can see from the following images.

Black and White chart

Color chart

Faxing is one of the tasks that you can do without the aid of a computer; because of this, it is important for it to be easy. Faxing a document is only as difficult as dialing a phone number and making sure your paper is in the ADF with the text facing up. Because there is not a duplexer on the ADF, you can only send single-sided documents. If you have a double-sided document you will have to copy one of the sides onto another page and then fax it as two single-sided documents. I really had no problems setting it up. I was even able to set up the fax to only pick up on a double ring, a double ring is a distinctive ring my phone company set up to indicate a fax was coming.

Fax splash screen

Fax screen

Copying, like faxing, is also something you can do without the need of a computer. Like faxing, you can only copy single-sided documents, but you can copy two single-sided documents onto one double-sided page. There are also many other options like reducing or enlarging your copy.

Copy splash screen

Copy screen

Overall the printing, scanning, and copying was good quality and fast. I printed off several pictures that I had and I could definitely tell that they were less quality than a store picture. Printing speeds were fairly fast. The MX850 was able to print 5 Black and White pages in about 1 minute and 25 seconds. Color printing was a bit slower, it took 1 minute and 40 seconds to print 5 color pages. During the printing of both black and white and color pages the MX850 paused several times for about 10 seconds each time. I can only guess that it was buffering the rest of the print job, never the less it was annoying to have the printer just stop out of the blue.

Printing photos was decent at about 1 photo every 50 seconds, but I would not recommend this printer for photos because the quality is not very good. As you can see below the second photo is from the MX850 and it is really grainy. The first photo is from the Epson Artisan 700 and it looks much better.

Epson Artisan 700

Canon MX850

Scanning was fast with both color and black and white, both had a speed of about 12 pages per minute. Copying was quite a bit slower than scanning, but that is because it has to print what is scanned. The MX850 was able to copy about 3 1/2 pages per minute in black and white. Quality was excellent in all the tests, except the text. The text was quite a bit less than perfect. As you can see, the HP5L laser printer was the best.

HP5L

Canon MX850

Support

Canon provides a one-year limited warranty for the Pixma MX850, as well as a year of free, toll-free phone support Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. ET. You can also get tech support via e-mail, and Canon says it will respond within 24 hours. Canon’s site has FAQs, a troubleshooting tool, downloadable drivers and software, and PDFs of product and software manuals.

Conclusion

If you have more than one computer and you are looking for a new All-In-One office printer, then I think this one would be great. Because this is not a photo printer I won’t complain that the photos were not very good, but I will say that I was disappointed in the speed of the document printing. As I mentioned above, the printer would stop printing about every 3 pages, my assumption is so that it could fill up its memory. This process of stopping really caused the printing to take a long time. Either Canon needs to use faster internal memory or they need to fix this in there software. There is no excuse for long delays during printing. A decent printer should be able to keep up with any printing task. I can only hope that in the future Canon will work to fix this problem and the others that I mentioned. As always compare prices before purchasing.

Earlier this year I reviewed the Canon Pixma MP530. This printer was very capable and produced great prints and fast scans, but it only worked with one computer at a time. This time around we are looking at the MX700 which has the ability to connect to a network.

Features

• 2 picoliter sized ink droplets
• PictBridge capable
• 2400 x 4800 dpi, with 48-bit color depth
• 30 page automatic document feeder
• USB 2.0 interface
• Plug into a Network: connect to a home or office network
• High resolution: up to 4800 x 1200 color dpi.
• 2 Way Paper feed: Built-in dual paper trays
• High-end faxing: Fax at up to 33.6 Kbps2 in color/B&W

When I reviewed the MP530 my biggest complaint was that I could only use it with one computer at a time. The MX700 adds the ability to connect to a network and use all the features with any computer that is also connected to the network. I would consider this the most significant upgrade.

The scanner is the other upgrade, it is fairly standard and provides scan resolutions of 2400 x 4800 dpi optical and 19,200 x 19,200 dpi interpolated. The MP530 provided scan resolutions of 1200 x 2400. The output for each scan is 48-bit internal/24-bit external. The maximum document size that can be scanned is 8.5″ x 11.7″. The automatic document feeder (ADF) can be used to make scanning easier by letting you load 30 pages to scan and then walk away and come back when it is finished.

Unfortunately, not everything got an upgrade. In fact, some things were downgraded. Specifically, the MX700 uses only four ink cartridges, where the MP530 used five ink cartridges. This is what I would consider the most significant downgrade. The colors that the MX700 uses are: cyan, magenta, yellow,
and a pigment-based black, the color that it is missing is dye-based black. The dye-based black was used for mixing with the other colors so the printer can make new colors. Without this color the printer will have a much harder time printing photos. In addition, the MX700 has 2 picoliter sized ink droplets, and the MP530 has 1 picoliter sized ink droplets. This means the MX700 drops are twice the size as the MP530. One more reason that pictures on the MX700 will not look as good as they did on the MP530.

The cost of photos remains about the same. The pigment-based black cartridge costs $16.25 and the color cartridges are $14.95. One good thing is that the MX700 comes with full ink cartridges, which means you won’t have to buy new cartridges anytime soon. A light mounted on the front of each cartridge slot tells you when your cartridge is empty. Because the MX700 uses the same cartridges as the MP530 and they cost the same, I assume they have the same yield. Because of this the price per print of a 4″ x 6″ photo quality picture is about 15 cents and for a full sized page of mixed text and color is about 9 cents.

The fax uses a built-in 33.6 Kbps (Super G3 color fax) modem, this is the same as the MP530. Even though it is a slower modem you will probably not max it out because most public telephone lines limit you to 28.8 Kbps or lower, depending on telephone line conditions. With this modem you can transmit in Color and Black and White. It takes about 3 seconds per page to send a Black and White page and about 1 minute 20 seconds per page for color documents. Make sure the other end also has a color fax, Otherwise you are wasting your time. With the included internal memory the fax can also store 40 speed-dial codes, and receive 100 incoming pages.

Fax Speed Dial

The copier offers a lot of useful features. It is able to copy in color and in black and white. Color is copied at about 3.2 seconds per page and Black and White is copied about 2.1 seconds per page. There are also many other features that you can use when you copy like: Auto Magnification, AE (Auto Exposure), Borderless, Auto Duplex, Fit-to-Page, 4 on 1, 2 on 1, Image Repeat, Sort Copy, Continuous Copy: 1-99 Pages, Dual Color Gamut Processing Technology. The copier also allows you to reduce and enlarge from 25% to 400%.

The trend of consolidating equipment is going faster and faster. Cell Phones and PDAs are becoming intertwined and so are printers, scanners, copiers and faxes. The Canon MP530 is one of Canons latest entries into the All-In-One printer category.

Features

• 1,856 precision nozzles—up to 9600 x 2400 color dpi
• 1 picoliter sized ink droplets
• PictBridge capable
• Fax at up to 33.6 Kbps in color/B&W, store 40 speed-dial codes, and receive 150 incoming pages into memory.
• 1200-dpi scans, with 48-bit color depth.
• 30 page automatic document feeder
• USB 2.0 interface
• Dual Color Gamut Processing Technology automatically optimizes copy quality based on the type of originals you are copying.

If there is a feature that can be added to a printer then the Canon MP530 probably has it. The MP530 includes a Color inkjet printer, Scanner, Fax, Copier, and a PictBridge connection. It is only missing a network card, media card slots and an LCD preview screen. The bigger brother to this printer, the Pixma MP830, provides faster speeds, media card slots, and a preview LCD, but still no networking capability. The MP830 costs about $100 more.

IMG_3125.JPG

The inkjet printer uses five ink cartridges. The colors are: dye-based black, cyan, magenta, yellow, and a pigment-based black. The dye-based black is used for mixing with the other colors so the printer can make new colors. The pigment-based black is for text and stuff that is all black. The dye-based ink cartridge costs $14.25 each, and the pigment-based black cartridge costs $16.25. Unlike other printers the MP530 ships with full ink cartridges. This means you won’t have to buy new cartridges anytime soon. A light mounted on the front of each cartridge slot tells you when your cartridge is empty. According to the costs and the yeild of each cartridge the price per print of a 4″ x 6″ photo quality picture is about 15 cents and for a full sized page of mixed text and color is about 9 cents.

IMG_3107.JPG

The fax uses a built in 33.6 Kbps (Super G3 color fax). Even though it is a slower modem you will probably not max it out because most public telephone lines limit you to 28.8 Kbps or lower, depending on telephone line conditions. With this modem you can transmit in Color and Black and White. It takes about 3 seconds per page to send a Black and White page and about 1 minute 20 seconds per page for color documents. Make sure the other end also has a color fax otherwise you are wasting your time. With the included internal memory the fax can also store 40 speed-dial codes, and receive 150 incoming pages.

The scanner is fairly standard and provides scan resolutions of 1200 x 2400 dpi optical and 19,200 x 19,200 dpi interpolated. The output for each scan is 48-bit internal/24-bit external. The maximum document size that can be scanned is 8.5″ x 11.7″. The automatic document feeder (ADF) can be used to make scanning easier by letting you load 30 pages to scan and then walk away and come back when it is finished.

IMG_3121.JPG

The copier offers a lot of useful features. It is able to copy in color and in black and white. Color is copied at about 3.2 seconds per page and Black and White is copied about 2.1 seconds per page. There are also many other features that you can use when you copy like: Auto Magnification, AE (Auto Exposure), Borderless, Auto Duplex, Fit-to-Page, 4 on 1, 2 on 1, Image Repeat, Sort Copy, Continuous Copy: 1-99 Pages, Dual Color Gamut Processing Technology. The copier also allows you to reduce and enlarge from 25% to 400%.

Design

When you first look at the MP530 you will be impressed at how Canon fits so much into such a little package. Even though it is compact with dimensions of 18.5″ wide, 18.4″ deep, and 10.4″ tall it is not a tiny printer. Add to that a weight of 28 lbs. and you are looking at something you won’t want to move every day. I recommend a separate table or stand for the printer because it would take over any desk it was put on.

The front of the MP530 is where you will find the controls, paper output, and a PictBridge connection. The controls consist of about 30 buttons which control every aspect of the printer and a small display. Fourteen of those buttons are set aside for the Fax functionality. You have 12 for dialing numbers just like on a phone and a redial and coded dial button. The five buttons to the left of the fax buttons are for accessing the menus. The three buttons to the left of those are for manually starting the copier or fax, there is a button for color and another for black and white copies and faxes. Going left again we see another 9 buttons that configure some copy and fax functionality. Left again you see three more buttons that determine what mode the printer is in. This mode determines what it does when you press buttons and access menus. For example, if you are in fax mode, then when you press the start button the MP530 starts sending a fax. Also, if you want a fax to be printed immediately when it is received you need to be in fax mode, otherwise it will be stored in memory. You can print and scan from your computer no matter what mode it is in. The last button which is the furthest left is the power button. There is nothing fancy here it just turns the printer on and off.

IMG_3120.JPG

Below the control panel is the paper output tray, PictBridge connection and a paper cartridge. One of the nicest features of the paper output tray is if you forget to open it up, it will automatically open when printing begins. The PictBridge connection is standard, just plug in your camera and choose print. The paper cassette is something I have not seen before in a compact printer like this, but it is very nice. You can load your plain paper in here and leave the rear paper tray in the back for your custom paper. Use the feed switch button on the control panel to choose where you want the paper to come from. You can also use the printer settings on your computer to override the feed switch. Both the paper cassette and the rear paper tray can hold about 150 sheets of paper.

IMG_3124.JPG

On the top is the Automatic Document Feeder. This will hold up to 30 pages at a time and can be used for the Fax, Scanner and Copier. Behind that is the manual paper loading tray. It is covered up with a nice cover that when folded up will act like the paper guide. Also on the back is the rear cover. This is a large door that opens so you can clear jammed paper. On the right side of the back is the USB and the phone line connection, and on the left is the power plug.

IMG_3122.JPG

When you first open the box you will notice that you will need to install some things. The main things to install are the print cartridges, and the cartridge holder. There are clear instructions on how to do this, but it is not in the manual, instead Canon put it on a separate piece of paper. I highly recommend that you pay attention to this paper and follow it closely. Once you have the ink installed you are ready to go. You don’t even need a computer to begin using the fax and copier functionality. If you want to scan and print you will first need to install the software and plug it into a computer.

IMG_2385.JPG

Printing to the printer is as easy as just pushing the print button from your favorite program, but buried in many menus are a lot of configurations that will allow you to set the print quality, paper type and even do double sided printing. On a printer like this double sided printing is a very nice feature. It is not a clearly marked feature, but you can find it, if you look under the printer properties on the page setup tab — it is called Duplex Printing. If you don’t know what duplex means then this will really confuse you because that same section talks about stapling. This printer does not include a stapler, but instead will leave a margin so that you can staple the pages later. For some reason, I don’t know why, Canon thought it would make sense to put duplex printing and stapling together. I would have preferred a simple checkbox that said Double Sided printing. Once you have it setup double sided printing works great.

page_setup_big.jpg

Scanning is something you can do from the computer or from the printer. Either way it will need to be connected to a computer or else it won’t have anywhere to send the scan. You will also need to be running a program that can accept a scanned document or image. Luckily, the Canon MP530 ships with one such program, the Presto! PageManager. The quality of the scan is excellent as you can see from the following images.

color_chart.jpg

color_chart_close.jpg

bw_chart.jpg

Faxing is one of the tasks that you will do without the aid of your computer; because of this, it is important for it to be easy. Faxing a document is only as difficult as dialing a phone number and making sure your paper is in the ADF with the text facing up. Because there is not a duplexer on the ADF, you can only send single sided documents. If you have a double sided document you will have to copy one of the sides onto another page and then fax it as two single sided documents. I really had no problems setting it up. I was even able to set up the fax to only pick up on a double ring, a double ring is a distinctive ring my phone company setup to indicate a fax was coming.

Copying, like faxing, is also something you can do without the need of a computer. Like faxing, you can only copy single sided documents, but you can copy two single sided documents onto one double sided page. There are also many other options like reducing or enlarging your copy.

Overall the printing, scanning, and copying was really good quality and fast. I printed off several pictures that I had and I could not tell that they came from a printer, and not from the store. Printing speeds were also very fast. The MP530 was able to print about 6 pages a minute in Black and White. Printing photos was a lot slower at about 1 photo every 3 minutes. Scanning was fast with both color and black and white, both had a speed of about 5 pages per minute. Copying was a little slower then scanning, but that is because it has to print what is scanned. The MP530 was able to copy about 4 pages per minute in black and white. Quality was excellent in all the tests, even with text, which is difficult for ink-jet printers. The text was not as clear as my laser printer, but it was much clearer than my old Epson ink-jet.

HP text

MP530 text

Original text

MP530 photo

Professional photo

The only complaint I have about this printer is the lack of Network support. I have a home and office network where I need to be able to print from more than one computer. It would be nice to even be able to scan and fax from the other computers. If Canon would add a network card and add network support to the software then there would be nothing that this printer could not do. You can hook this printer up to a print server, but because most print servers do not support multi-function printers you would lose the ability to scan and fax from your computer. There are USB hubs that claim to be able to share USB devices between more than one computer, but I have not tried them so I don’t know how well they work.

Warranty and Support

Canon provides a one-year limited warranty for the Pixma MP530, as well as a year of free, toll-free phone support Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. ET. You can extend the warranty to three years for $95. You can also get tech support via e-mail, and Canon says it will respond within 24 hours. Canon’s site has FAQs, a troubleshooting tool, downloadable drivers and software, and PDFs of product and software manuals.

Conclusion

If you are looking for a new All-In-One printer then I think you have just read about it. I would even consider buying one myself and as soon as I send this one back to Canon I might just do that. With options and features galore and a decent warranty you can count on this printer to last a long time. Now if Canon would only add network support they would truly have an great printer that could be used in an Office. As always compare prices before purchasing.