[Tesselator]

I often hear complaints whenever a company doesn't act as it should in support
of its product owners and users but rarely do I hear about those times when the
company makes good or outperforms the expectations typically imposed. Maybe
it's just because I am usually looking for the bad news in order to prepare myself
when forming the "hope for the best expect the worst" axiom.

To get directly to the point I recently had a small problem with the canon MP810
printer where it started printing thin gaps in it's output. Doing the calibration
thing didn't help so I called in and arranged to take it back. Good thing I had
purchased the $10 three-year extended warrantee offered through the store.



Ten days later it came back as repaired but wasn't really and a few days later I
took it back in again. This time it took only two days when a call came in from
the store saying Canon wasn't going to be able to get the parts for a month or
more so could I come in and get a replacement model. The one Canon said
was "the same" was the MP970 but when I got there I noticed it was a 7 cartridge
ink system ($$) and slower PPM. I pointed to the Pixma MX850 saying that except



for the extra Facsimile capabilities this was actually closer being a 5 cartridge ink
system and much faster. I hate ink-jet cartridge systems! I really feel like they're
designed just to rip off the customer and keep us paying and paying... and paying.
Anyway the shop guy dude made a call and a few minutes later I was walking out
with the MX850 in my arms - well,, in a shopping cart but you know what I mean.

The features of the new MX850 seem pretty nice:

• Box Content: Pixma MX850 Office All-In-One Printer, Document Kit: Cross
  Sell Sheet, Easy Setup Instructions, Leopard Information Sheet, Network Setup
  Guide, Quick Start Guide, Setup Software & User's Guide CD-ROM, Ink Tanks:
  PGI-5 (Pigment Black), CLI-8 (Black/Cyan/Magenta/Yellow), Power Cord, Print
  Head, Bundled Media (MP-101 A4 - 4 sheets), Sample Media (PP-201 4 x
  6 - 5 sheets), and Telephone Line Cable
• Maximum 9600 x 2400 color dpi with microscopic droplets as small as 1
  picoliter using FINE technology for high-quality photo print
• Fast printing up to 31-ppm black, 24-ppm color and a photo lab quality,
  borderless 4x6 photo in 21 seconds
• Print Resolution: Color Up to 9600 x 2400 dpi and Black Up to 600 x 600 dpi
• Copy Speed: Black 31 CPM (As fast as 1.9 seconds per page) and Color 24
  cpm (As fast as 2.5 seconds per page)
• Reductions Enlargement: 25% - 400%
• Max Resolutions: Optical 4800 x 9600 dpi, ADF 600 x 600 dpi, and Interpolated
  19,200 x 19,200 dpi
• Color Depth: 48-Bit internal/24-bit external
• Max Document Size: Flatbed 8.5" x 11.7" and ADF 8.5" x 14"
• Fax Modem Speed: Up to 33.6 Kbps (Super G3 color FAX)
• Transmission Speed: Black 3 seconds per page and Color 1 minute per page
• Memory Capacity: up to 250 Pages
• Speed Dialing: 100 Locations
• Standard Interface: USB 2.0 High-Speed, Card Slots, PictBridge, and Bluetooth
  v2.0 +EDR
• Card Slot: SD Memory Card, SDHC Memory Card, MultiMediaCard, miniSD Card,
  RS-MMC, MicroSD Card, CompactFlash Card, MicroDrive, Memory Stick, Memory
  Stick PRO, Memory Stick Duo, Memory Stick PRO Duo, and xD-Picture Card
• OS Compatibility: Windows Vista, Windows XP, 2000 and Mac OS X v. 10.3.9 to
  10.5.x
• Dimension: Width 19.0" x Depth 20.0" x Height 10.2"
• Weight: 30.7 pounds

Good on Canon for taking care of business and doing the right thing!

[Douglashh]

I"m in the market for an MX850. Let me know what you think of the MX850.

[turtle777]

People still buy inkjet printers ? Wow

-t

[Tesselator]

Originally Posted by turtle777 

People still buy inkjet printers ? Wow

-t

What else is there? Color lasers capable of the same rich color beauty are what,
about $1,000.00 ? PC World - Chart - Top 10 Color Laser Printers And then
another $300 for a fax, and another $400 for a flatbed, and can it print on CDs
which I use allot, or can it print on T-shirt transfers which I use once a month
or so. $1,000+$300+$400 and that's for the very cheapest of each one of those
plus it can't do what I want... Hmm. That's too much for me. Also when I was
leasing a color copier

for my CD shop, prints were like $0.40 each not including running costs which
probably worked out to another $0.40 or so... I dunno about little $1K to $5K
lasers but the very last thing I need is a big power draw for a featureless single
function monster. It'd be a very different story if I were running a business that
needed lots of color pages - but I'm not.

An InkJet runs on like 5 watts, costs $0.12 a print and is massively multi-function
all for about $250

[turtle777]

Printing on CDs and T-Shirts ?

Yeah, I did that, too. In the last millennium.

-t

[angelmb]

I have a Canon MP530, very satisfied with it… like most people over here whom also have a Canon device.

[skybolt]

Here's another good story about Canon. We purchased some cartridges from CompUSA when they were marking things down for going out of business. We bought them at half price. One of the cartridges failed, and I emailed Canon customer service asking if we had any recourse since we could not return it. The reply came back that certainly they would send us a new cartridge! I answered some questions in their email, and within about 3 business days I had a new cartridge! I knew I liked Canon products!

[Tesselator]

Originally Posted by turtle777 

Printing on CDs and T-Shirts ?

Yeah, I did that, too. In the last millennium.

-t

And then you became old, disinterested, and apathetic? Yeah, I hear being
bald, fat, and old makes one lose their creativity and stop making kewl things.
I hope that never happens to me!

[Tesselator]

Originally Posted by Douglashh 

I"m in the market for an MX850. Let me know what you think of the MX850.

I've had a chance to play with it now and I like it. About the only thing I think you
might want to be aware of that I bet no "reviews" will mention are a few limitations
of the scanners. Yes, scanners with an "s". It actually has two of them. One is the
flatbed and I think it's "optical resolution is 4800 x 9600 dpi. It moves across the
document just like any other common scan bed. If you'll notice; the spec sheet says
"Optical 4800 x 9600 dpi, ADF 600 x 600 dpi,". I'm guessing there's a separate fixed
scan head which it passes the document over from the Automatic Document Feeder
(ADF). The driver is setup rather oddly in that the options available for the bed are
different than the ones available for the ADF. For the bed there is Photo, Magazine,
Color, and a few other settings for grey and etc. For the ADF there is only "Color" and
a Grey mode. The "Color" mode is pretty bad if you're scanning images or color prints.

Here's a comparison I made for ya:

I didn't include the bed's "color" scan as it's likely the same as for the ADF. So all I did
were scans of Bed-Magazine, Bed-Photo, and ADF-Color. I also included a digital photo
of the same source page so you can see what's being scanned. The camera shot is in
room light so pretty pale. The source doc looks most like "Magazine" to me but that
setting adds red-tones to it as I guess you can notice in the proof strips. The "Photo"
setting seems to have added some extra patterns that I can't see in the source. I might
just need a magnifying glass or something though. Those source images (four across)
are about one inch wide - meaning together they span about 4.5 inches on the source
page when you add in the spaces between them.

Anyway the point is that the best setting available in the ADF driver is not good enough
for photos so if you have ideas of auto scanning stacks of color pages or photos I guess
you can't. It's great for OCR or G3 Color fax quality scans tho. Additionally, if you scan
at 600dpi (my scans above were at 300), add a slight blur, and then scale down to 20%
or 25% it should look pretty good - as good as the source doc I guess anyway!

Other things that won't be in reviews are the lack of ability to scan directly to a mem
card inserted into the printer's card-reader slots, and etc. but those may be obvious
to anyone with previous ink-jet experience? I guess you can just assume that if the
review doesn't mention a specific ability then it's probably not available. I could do
so many kewl things in firmware that they're not doing... grrr!

If I had to rate it myself I'd give it a 7 out of 10. It loses points for having a cheaply
made plastic body (compared to printers of 15 or 20 years ago!!!), not being able to
make use of all the physical technology present in its construction (like the things I
mentioned with its inability to write to its memory card or a USB memory stick, etc.),
and still it's using a rip-off design for its ink cartridges (these could easily be 3 or 4
times higher capacity each and half to a quarter of the current price at the same time!).
It gets extra points for having an ultra-fast start-up/warm-up time (about 100 times
faster than the MP810), being so damn multi-functional (CD, Fax, G3 color fax, Scan,
ADF, memory card reader, USB memory reader, USB2, T-base 100 thiner-net, bluetooth,
color copier, etc.), being the cheapest per-page photo-quality inkjet on the market, and
being one of the fastest if not thee fastest.

Here's a few reviews:

Canon Pixma MX850 Multifunction Printer Review - Canon Multi-Function Printer Reviews
Steve's Digicams - Breaking News - Canon 01/23/2008 Press Release

And of course you can find more on your own by searching. I hope that helps. Have
fun bro!

Laterski...
Feel free to ask any questions!

[Douglashh]

Tesselator, thanks for the very good information. I'm going to order one this weekend. Buy.com has them for $229.

[Tesselator]

Good price! They're $350 here in japan at the current exchange rate.

[Kenneth]

I purchased the PIMXA MP610 last month, it's nice and good driver support. Is this an adv?

[Tesselator]

What does "adv" mean?

You mean is it a step up? If that's what you meant I'm not sure. I don't know
the MP610, I only know he MP810 and the MX850. I think the only difference
between the MP610 and the MP810 is that the MP810 has CD printing and it
has slide and film negatives scanning abilities. The other thing the MP610
might not have is the infra red communication but I like I say I don't know
the MP610.

The basic difference between the MP810 and the MX850 it that the MX850
has fax and ethernet but no slide and film-negative scanner. But other than
that it's identical as far as I can tell. The MP810 is about 2 years old and the
MX850 is only a few months old. All three use the exact same print head
and the same 5 ink cartridges.

There are 7-cartridge Canon printers like the MP-970 they tried to give me and
they are supposed to be superior in regards to print quality but the downsides
for me with 7-cartridge designs are slowness, price per-print, and I just can't
detect any quality differences without a microscope and a professor standing
next to me pointing out what I'm supposed to be seeing.

As far as getting photo-quality prints at a reasonable speed economically, I
think your MP610 is still on top of the heap within the realm of ink-jet types.

[Douglashh]

Tesselator - Have you printed any photographs with the MX850? How did they come out?

[Tesselator]

Originally Posted by Douglashh 

Tesselator - Have you printed any photographs with the MX850? How did they come out?

Yeah, looks identical to 1-hour photo printing. The MP610, the MP810 and the MX850 have
identical printheads so all three should produce identical results. I dunno about in the USA
but here in Japan you could take in some test data on a memory card or something and print
out a few samples. I did before I got the MP810 originally.

I dunno if this shows anything but here's a photo of the output followed by a scaled down
version of the source data:



And here is the source data: (I'd send the actual plant but it'd likely gum up the network )



If I use chrome paper and special order the print or do the print myself I can get a better
quality print than this machine can produce but that paper stock is $8 a sheet or $75 to
have a photoshop order it out (for an 8x10).