We recently moved into another house and I decided that, at last, I would do something about our printers. I had a Brother printer, I don’t remember the model. It was a multi function machine and it did a reasonable job until recently. Just lately you had to stand next to it and hold the print cover down before it would print. This was my second Brother. The first packed up after doing in excess of 10,000 scans which i thought wasn’t bad. The second Brother was cheaper than the first, and not as fast, but still reasonable.

My wife had an old Canon. I don’t remember its model number either, but it was old and it was one of those small printers that you can get for around $50 these days. It cost probably 3 times that when she bought it. It was very slow but it never missed a beat. The problem with it was that it was set up in her make-shift office, but she worked on a laptop, often in the lounge room in front of the heater. She would then carry her laptop to the printer, plug it in, and print.

I decided to end all this. So I bought a Canon MX850. My son had a slightly different model Canon and he said it did everything he wanted. His model was superceded by now so I had a look at what was on offer.

This is what I needed. First I had to be able to network the printer. I print from my two desktop PCs which are networked, my laptop and my wife’s laptop. Second, I wanted to be able to print onto a CD or DVD. In the past I have delivered software to clients on CDs which I have then written on. Not a very professional look. Third, I wanted to be able to print duplex, or both sides of the paper. I know that you can print on one side, take the paper out, turn it over, and print the other side. I always forget which way to put the paper back in. So duplex printing solved that for me.

The Canon does all of that. The duplex printing is slow. The dialog box says that after it has printed one side it is waiting for the ink to dry before feeding it back in. I can live with the low speed. I don’t do duplex very often, but there are times when it is very useful and it does this automatically.

The print quality on the CDs is good, and easy to do. The printer comes with a program called CD Label Print. It is not very sophisticated or feature rich but it does the job. The version that came with the printer is out of date but a later version is available. I am sure that there are other CD printing software packages on the net, and I may look for one at some stage. But at the moment it produces CDs that are much more professional looking than my handwritten scrawl.

The printing review web sites may have things to say about the print quality. I am not a graphic artist and nearly all the printing I do is straight text. I have no complaints about the quality.

The printer, like many others these days, has options for printing photographs from digital camera cards. I haven’t tried this and I am not likely to. It seems a very expensive way to get photos. But if you need a photo in a hurry you can do it.

The final thing that I don’t know yet is the cost of ink. I have bought ink but I haven’t used the printer for long enough to work out the cost. But it is a bit like buying petrol for the car. It is one of the costs of doing business so you pay for it. And it certainly isn’t a major cost.

If you are after a multi funtion printer that does everything and does it well then the Canon is worth a look.