High quality photo printing and scanning (Canon Pixma MP980)

Member Name: Rocketeer007

Product:	Canon Pixma MP980
Date:	03/08/09 (104 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good connectivity, high quality prints and scans

Disadvantages: Quite high ink usage, slow scanning over Wi-Fi

The Canon Pixma MP980 offers combined printer and scanner functionality, including automatic duplex on printing and scanning of slides & negatives.

As part of the Pixma range, the MP980 is targeted at home users wanting to print high quality photos. To this end, it uses 7 separate ink cartridges; cyan, magenta, yellow, photo black, grey and pigment black. The inclusion of the grey cartridge allows printing of very high quality black and white images without much dithering or banding. The print quality is excellent - photos printed on good quality photo paper are as good as photo lab quality - better than some of the high street coin operated kiosks in many cases. Printing on cheap paper does show though, with colours muted; however, there is no visible bleed even on standard inkjet paper due to the quality of the ink.
Printing to printable DVDs and CDs is very easy to manage using the supplied CD tray - however, there is no storage for this, and you don't really want it to get dusty.

The scanning functionality is likewise excellent. As a copier, it is slower than a dedicated copy machine, but the speed is acceptable for single copies, and it offers a very useful preview of the copy before you print - this is all on the device itself, without needing a PC connected.
Stand-alone, you can copy to USB or memory card, or you can copy directly to a connected computer using the controls on either the PC or the printer.
Scanning across a Wi-Fi network connection is slow, but this is a factor of the network speed - using either the USB or normal Wired network connection produces scans at an acceptable speed.

Connecting it to the network is not trivial, but can be done without any major difficulties. Installing the device drivers under Vista caused a few difficulties, but with the latest updates from the website these were quickly ironed out.
Note that as a network connected device, you can print from any computer on your network (wired or wireless) without having to have one particular PC on all the time.

Overall, this is a high quality, robust and effective device.

One concern is the ink usage - after 6 months, with only fairly light usage, the ink cartridges already are warning that they are getting low.

Summary: An excellent choice for photo printing and scanning