Canon PIXMA MX860 Review – Wireless Printer

Overall Rating:         

A marginally slow inkjet All In One printer from canon that offers Wi-Fi, Ethernet connectivity and auto duplex.

What makes up for the slow speeds is the excellent print quality and a mass array of great features which the Canon PIXMA MX860 presents. It’s reasonably cheap alternative and especially compared to laser All in One printers if you are only need to print small amounts at a time. The Canon PIXMA MX860 isn’t as fast as its competitive laser printers, but then again its 1/3 of the cost.

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The Canon PIXMA MX860 All In One Wireless printer is clearly built for office use. It includes an auto document feeder, front paper cassette and a rear fold out cassette. Its media capacity is trivial though, it manages to old a max number of 300 A4 sheets between the both cassette trays. 

The Canon MX860 has both USB & Ethernet connections together with Wireless capability, an integrated fax and media card slots for a Memory Card, SD, Compact-Flash, as well as Pact-Bridge USB option. The major standout feature of the Canon MX860 printer is the addition of automatic duplex feature, which is often absent on most inkjet’s and even a lot of laser All In One’s. This feature saves paper by printing on both sides of the paper automatically – however don’t despair this option can be turned off with the click of a button. 

As I mentioned earlier the Canon PIXMA MX860 is somewhat slow, so how slow? Well it will take 12 seconds to print the first page of a draft document and 15 seconds for high colour documents. The draft documents then printed at an average of 10 pages per minute (after the first page) in our test, meanwhile standard quality color printed at 8ppm. 

Photo documents are slower, at 6.2ppm for draft quality and at 3.5ppm for normal quality. Full page Photo Printing isn't for the most part fast too. Your standard 4x6” photo took is on average 33 seconds and full size A4 photos took around 1minute and 30 seconds to produce. .

I think you will have trouble finding any new Canon printer that doesn’t provide great quality prints and the PIXMA MX860 is no different. The crisp black text is concise and clear and doesn’t suffer any aberration. Though it was noticed that the characters print out bolder than they actually are, this makes text which is size 6pt more readable and easier on the eyes – defiantly a good feature.

The machine produces great vibrant colors and the text is still readable when printed on backgrounds with light/dark colors. The blues however are a tad oversaturated and have a risk of looking wet – this isn’t a big issue and is only noticeable on some shades of blue.

Photos are very neutral and true to their original -  Colours are extremely vibrant, but text is still readable when printed on colour backgrounds. Blues are a little oversaturated and can end up looking wet but are otherwise acceptable. Photos are surprisingly coloured neutral and accurate. Though the PIXMA MX860's feature set suggests that it shouldn't be used primarily for photo printing, this inkjet multifunction printer holds its own, even if it might not suit those who want particularly lively results. 

The colours of scanned images can be highly under-saturated, but the end results are quite detailed so this multifunction should be suitable for scanning documents.

The Canon PIXMA MX860 provides presets that can be used to scan directly from the unit to PC, USB memory stick or memory card.  For its cheap price, the Canon PIXMA MX860 All In One printer is a well-featured, and is capable of handling most tasks in the home. The bottom line is If quality is a higher priority than the printing speed then this inkjet multifunction is a much better buy than most priced competitors. 

Canon PIXMA MX860 Specs 

General Spec

Fax:  Yes 

Fax Speed: 33.6Kbps 

Available Colours: Silver 

Size

Length (mm) 

434 

Width (mm) 

492 

Height (mm) 

226 

Weight (kg) 

11.9 

Supported Memory Media 

Memory Stick Duo, Compact Flash, Memory Stick, Secure Digital (SD) 

Printer Type: Inkjet 

Printer Usage: Small Office / Home Office 

Colour Printer: Yes 

Photo Printer: Yes 

Maximum Resolution (B&W) 

9600dpi x 2400dpi 

Direct Printing: Yes   

Print Media Supported 

A4, Photo paper, Plain paper 

Print Media Size Maximum 

A4 (210 x 297mm) 

Print Media Load Type 

Automatic, Manual 

Total Media Capacity (Sheets) 

300 

Media Feeders 

Front cassette, rear paper tray 

Double-sided Printing: Yes 

Scanner Resolution 

2400dpi x 4800dpi 

Software 

Compatibility 

Mac OS, Windows 

Wired Connections 

Wired Terminals / Ports 

RJ11 Phone Jack, RJ45, USB 2.0 

Wireless Connections 

Wireless technology supported 

WLAN 802.11 b/g 

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