Electronics For Everyone

Wireless All-in-One Home Office Printer with 2.5-Inch LCD and Auto Duplex ADF.

User Reviews about Canon PIXMA MX870 Wireless Office All-in-One Printer (4206B002)

Set-up was relatively easy: load the install disk and run the programs. Both the MacBook and Lenovo Thinkpad running Windows XP recognized the printer wirelessly through a 2Wire (ATT) router. Functions: printing, copying, scanning (B/W and color; one-sided or duplex) all worked well. Scanner resolution at 600 dpi looks pretty good, although scanning take a few seconds to process each pass. Quiet and looks good. For an inkjet printer, I've very favorably impressed after a few weeks of moderate use. Canon seems to make consistently good products in my experience (primarily with their digicams). -- Easy set-up for both MacBook and XP

I like this printer. Print quality is excellent, and it's remarkably quiet. Once you have it all set up, it's fine, but getting there is harder than it needs to be.

First, like another reviewer pointed out, the manual is hopeless. You can't begin to imagine how unusable the manual is unless you've tried to read it. Truly amazingly hopeless. You can probably get by without the manual if all you want is a printer. If you need to figure out scanning or faxing, brace yourself for some frustrating reading.

There's a little LCD screen on the printer that you use for configuration. The user interface for this is very dated, and cumbersome. I've gotten spoiled by good user interfaces over the last 5 years, so it took me by surprise to see how annoying this printer's user interface actually is. There's also a Web administration interface, and that too is clumsy and only minimally useful.

A comparison printer is the HP Photosmart Premium C309a, slightly more expensive. The HP is beautiful and easy to use in every way that the Canon isn't. The HP has a beautiful user interface, both on the printer, and from the Web browser. The print quality from both is splendid. I think the Canon might be a bit quieter when it's printing. The styling of the Canon is more sleek, and the HP's styling is more functional. Build quality on both seems very good. The HP can print on CDs/DVDs, but the Canon can't. Also, the HP has a dedicated 4x6 photo paper tray so you can keep both photo paper and plain letter sized paper loaded at the same time. I own both of these printers, and I prefer the HP C309a because it's such a pleasure to use. But the Canon MX870 is a fine printer, and I like it too. -- Great little printer, funky setup