Initial impressions of Canon All-in-1

[davidedric]

Following your help in finding a printer, I said I would report back on what I chose. I was looking only for an A4 printer that would not just be dedicated to photography.

The printer I chose is the Canon All-in-1 model MG7550, which is one of their newest. It has just the three primary coloured inks, plus black, plus grey, plus a large black for regular documents. You can read the rest of the specs on Canon’s site if you are interested.

Preliminary observations:

Photograph Printing. As should be expected, it produces sharp detailed prints. I am happy with it so far, but until I get custom profiles for my regular papers, I’m not going to say any more. But no concerns. The speed is certainly adequate for the low volumes that I produce. I can’t yet tell about ink costs. For obvious reasons, I can’t readily demonstrate.

Photograph Copying: It performs surprising (at least to me) well. Here are two images. The first was exported from Lightroom. The second was printed on this machine’s predecessor, then scanned in the MG7550 at 600dpi, saved as a jpeg and re-exported from Lightroom without any manipulation and with the same settings as the first. Of course there is some degradation, and I could have played with it to get a more accurate rendition, but I think it’s a pretty decent shot. Setting it up took a little while, and I anticipate driving it mostly directly from the driver or “ScanGear” rather than the supplied apps, should I need it.









As a general purpose printer: The paper print quality is excellent, as good as I’ve seen on a home inkjet. However, the versatility is not so good. I had hoped to replace my existing printer which has two A4 sized trays. The MG7550 does have two trays, but the upper one can accommodate only 7”x5” photo paper as a maximum. I’m afraid that I missed this restriction when studying the spec., so my exiting printer will be staying for reasons that are a bit complicated and nothing to do with photography. However, this isn’t a big problem because…

As a wireless printer: The wireless took a little while to set up, but now it is working it has proved flawless so far. The printer sits in the same room as the router, but is more accessible than the existing one which is tied by a USB cable. That makes it far more pleasant to use. I also have an Android tablet, and I can now print from my tablet to the new printer using Google Cloud, which is a nice bonus that I am still exploring, but it basically works fine.

As a general purpose scanner/copier: The scanner works on a single flat platen, as normal. Scanning documents to plain paper looks very good, with the copy hard to distinguish from the original. I have yet to explore the copying facilities, including double sided, reducing and increasing the size of the image, and so on. Basic scanning and copying can be done using the front panel control on the printer, with software available to drive more complicated operations from the computer. It will certainly fit my needs.

User Interface: The front panel is easy to navigate. There is quite a large selection of apps bundled in, including Canon’s “Image Garden” which looks like a basic image handler with some image adjustment capability, maybe a bit like a local Picasa. I doubt whether I will be using many of these, but we will see.

Conclusions: Looking good so far, but the proof will be when I get down to printing in earnest. Obviously, the main reason for the purchase was to replace my existing printer, but now I’ve got over the disappointment of not being able to do that, I am beginning to see benefits in having both.

Dave

[Shadowman]

Nice, have fun.

[rpcrowe]

I read your excellent review and looked around at my printers.

I use the Canon Pixma 9000 Mk-ii for photo printing and use a B&W Brother Laser printer for my B&W document printing. The laser printer is extremely low cost and our cost is less than $.01 (one U.S. cent) per copy. The variables regarding the cost of printing would be the quality and cost of the paper used and whether we use OEM toner or 3rd party toner. The 3rd party toner seems to work quite as well as the OEM toner at a fraction of the cost.

My wife does a tremendous amount of office work in connection with our dog recue organization. She probably does as much as she would if she were running a small business. My wife has an Epson 3:1 printer, scanner, fax and also has a stand alone Brother scanner. She scans hundreds of documents a week and the Brother scanner is faster than the Epson for scanning and will produce the product in virtually any format she desires JPEG, PDF, etc. and has a lot of bells and whistles that the 3:1 Epson is lacking. We will use that printer for her color print document needs as long as the quantities are not great...

Color copies can be done quite inexpensively at local copy shops and we use that source for when color is required in our large volume copies or printed documents. It is less expensive doing it that way than paying for the Epson inkjet ink. However, we are experimenting with 3rd party ink which is far-far cheaper and seems (up to this point) to be working as well as the Epson OEM inks. Of course, colors of those documents don't need to be as accurate as colors for color photography printing...

By the way, my wife also does a lot of faxing, both sending and receiving. We have found that it is better for her uses to use an online Fax service (SMARTFAX) for both sending and receiving faxes. That way, we never have a paper jam and we can download or store any received fax in any format we desire. We also don't have to print a hard copy for sending a fax...

[allenlennon]

I have the canon mg7160, that i have bought purely for photo printing. Havent done much printing for photos due to the fact that i had a unpleasant " visitor last year and the insurance company wasnt being friendly. But now since im back into it, i am planning on printing my own photos up to A4 size. But the MG7160 is great, and looking back at the first few photos i printed came out great once i fiddled around with the settings on the computer. I am going to try third party ink to see how it goes, im not printing to sell so if im happy with it then that will do.