Great budget printer, scanner/photocopier! (Canon Pixma MP160)

Member Name: sentientphil

Product:	Canon Pixma MP160
Date:	21/07/09 (60 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: ease of use, one touch photocopying, silent mode, user friendly, does what it needs to do, normal

Disadvantages: likes flat paper, high quality ink runs low quickly !

What a printer for the price!
I have owned this MP160 for over a year now, and it has produced excellent photo's, and excellent documents! its scanner is excellent and is very good for text!

i have noted that people have said its photo quality is bad, but every photo i have printed has come out perfect, although you do have to use the proper fine photo ink cartridge (about £5 more) as the normal cartridge is designed for document colours and normal paper......
so its a little bulky, and isnt very pretty, but for a low budget componant, the cost goes into the insides, and they really have done a good job!!!

it has one touch photocopying, in colour, and one touch for black and white too... which is very quick! it has almost one touch scanning.... but a press of the button will open up the scan driver window on you pc desktop and give you a sizeable amount of options if you want to play around! the scan driver lets you crop easily and adjust the image quality and output format (*.jpg, *.pdf etc)
personally i dont use the bundled software, although i do use the photoshop type software included and the scan driver...

when i opened the box i had lots of software to play around with, and uninstalled it after a day, although the text recognition was brilliant, it can convert a scanned document and locate the text to copy it as normal writing for editing in notepad, word etc....
the box also included the printer, 1x normal colour and 1x normal black ink cartridge, power lead, USB PC cable, and excellent instructions.. it was up and running in a matter of 10 minutes!
before i started printing anything, i installed it, then had a play around with the print alignment! that was a great feature! it prints out a sheet of paper with test patterns on it and a small oval next to each pattern, its your job to fill in the ovals nearest the best pattern and scan it... it recognises the ovals you have filled in and automatically aligns the print heads!....

the printer can comfortably print any genre you can throw at it, im sure you can get better quality, but for what price?
in summery, it eats through the decent photo cartidges if printing just pictures like theres no tomorrow, but it will still probably work out cheaper than getting them developed.... the normal cartridges are perfect for documents and will last for a very long time! so if you want a printer combo that gives excellent document handling, and great photos, with the proper cartridge, and at a low price then this is for you! it will chuck out printed documents at a good enough rate for home, and it is quiet too.. and has a night time mode for even quieter printing...

i do have one negative, if you leave a ream of paper in there for too long, it will bend back on itself as the guide isnt high enough.... causing the cartridge to catch on the corner of the page... so it does like flat paper!
but apart from that i am still very pleased with it! and serves me perfectly!

Summary: One great budget printer!