When our loyal laser fax machine at the office broke down for the last time in October last year, a serviceman told us that it can still be repaired but the cost would be almost as high as buying a new one.
So the choice is obvious. You can’t go on repairing a machine that’s over a decade old, loyal though it was during those years.
Ours is a very small office, staffed by three persons — myself, the only male in the office, as the head and two others doing administrative and customer service, so any reasonably good machine would have serve us well. We don’t need a machine fit for rocket scientists.
After some discussions with the other two staff I proposed that why not we replace the fax machine with a new one — one that does more than faxing. “I’m thinking of a multifunction printer that does faxing, scanning, copying and printing,” I suggested. They agreed.
So off I went from one electronic shop to another, looking at the shapes and sizes of the latest multifunction printers in the market, jotting down the make and model, and later on cross-checked them with the many reviews available online by Google-ing the keyword “the best multifunction printers”.
I found Canon Pixma MP830 appearing consistently on the top of the rank in almost all of the reviews and decided to go for it. I could’ve bought other models but somehow, the brand Canon had a much influence on me. I’m a fan of Canon digital cameras afterall.
After almost a year of using it, what I can say is that the Pixma MP830 lives up to its review. Its a mean machine, fast and reliable; with sophisticated features yet it’s easy enough to use.
The main issues one might have with it — if one was buying it to be used primarily as a printer in a small office environment like ours — is its inability to network. You can only connect it to one PC via USB 2.0. A network printer is one thing Canon Pixma MP830 is not.
But some say you can now network USB printers via a special adapter but we haven’t tried it.
In our case, I didn’t really matter if we couldn’t network the MP830 because we are using it primarily as a standalone fax machine and not a printer. We use it for printing only when we want to print colour documents. We have installed the driver on a laptop computer and whenever we want to print documents in colour, we connect the laptop to the MP830.
But there was really no need for our office to print in colour but it’s a comforting thought to know you have the facility to print in colour in your office as and when you need it.
We already have two laser printers at the office — one, a laser printer connected to the two PCs of the two admin staff, the other a laser printer connected to my PC, so we didn’t really miss the MP830’s lack of networking capability.
We also have a dedicated photocopy machine which is capable of copying up to the size of A3 papers, but we still find the copier feature of the MP830 useful because of its ability to copy double-side documents at one go; and also we can copy up to 35 pages of A4 documents without having to feed it one by one as we would have with a copier machine.
All we need to do is to simply feed the A4 documents into the MP830’s ADF (automatic document feeder) and press “mono start” for black-and-white output or “color start” for colour output. Anyway, color or colour, it’s the same thing if you don’t already know it.
We can also do colour faxing with the MP830 if necessary. Colour faxed are costly in that it used up the colour ink catridges of the receiving machine and if we do that just to impress the other side, they’ll of course curse us under their breaths.
As for photo printing, I’ve tried printing on A4 photo papers and to my untrained eyes, the output was simply superb.
Other reviewers criticised the multifunction’s image printing quality which they say, was not good enough for those who are working in high graphic environment. If that is the case, then what you really need is perhaps a dedicated graphic printer and not a multifunction printer.
Obviously, you can’t have all in one, in its true sense, in all-in-ones.
I haven’t had any problem with the scan features of the MP830. It’s not the fastest scanner, I supposed, but that is not an issue with me. I scan often. Maybe once in a month and at the most four pages of documents, so I don’t really mind if the MP830 scanner is slower by a few seconds compared to a real scanner.
My verdict? If you can live with the lack of network capability, the MP830 is a machine for you. If a home multifunction printer, connected to one PC, is all you need and the Canon Pixma MP830 is all you need to have.
For a more technical review of the MP830, you can read it over at CNet.
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