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November 21, 2008

Canon Pixma MP620 review

Product Code: 2921B008AA

Canon's Pixma MP620 colour inkjet multifunction printer offers connectivity and capacity galore.

While its design has a few shortcomings, overall the Canon Pixma MP620 offers a good deal, especially for a busy home or school setting.

A few premium features distinguish the silvery Canon Pixma MP620. The control panel replaces a raft of buttons with a scrollwheel that lets you spin through options shown on the adjacent, tiltable, 2.5in colour LCD. The remaining buttons are clearly labeled and easy to use.

Standard connectivity covers USB, ethernet, and Wi-Fi; you need a extra-cost adaptor to enable Bluetooth. The Canon Pixma MP620 has two media slots that take most kinds of cards, but you'll need to buy a third-party adaptor to use the XD Picture Card format. The PictBridge port accepts only Canon-compatible devices.

The 150-sheet output tray automatically unfolds itself from the Canon Pixma MP620's front panel when you initiate a print job. You get two 150-sheet input trays: one underneath for letter-size plain paper, and a second in the rear for larger or thicker media.

Unfortunately, on our test unit, raising the telescoping guides for the rear vertical input involved a lot of tugging and clattering, and we accidentally collapsed them numerous times. Another drawback: the Canon Pixma MP620 lacks an automatic document feeder (ADF) and duplexing capabilities.

The Canon Pixma MP620 performed fairly well in our tests. It posted average speeds, producing 7.6 pages per minute (ppm) with plain text and 2.2ppm with graphics. The printer's pigment black ink produced impressively crisp, dark letters.

On colour graphics it uses a dye-based second black, plus cyan, magenta, and yellow. We found a bit too much yellow in some of our colour graphics samples; flesh tones, in particular, looked orangey on plain paper and a little jaundiced on Canon's own photo paper. Despite that and a slight graininess, images otherwise look vivid and natural. Scan and copy tests yielded good results as well.

At the time of this writing, Canon had yet to publish yields for the five separate ink cartridges. Other Canon printers with a similar design have had reasonable costs.

Canon's usually solid documentation had one notable problem this time: the printed Setup Guide features a confounding flowchart of installation options that stymie rather than advance the process. Aside from that, Canon's better-than-average rating in our Reliability and Service survey bodes well for your overall experience.

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Independent customer reviews from

Canon Pixma MP620 scored:
8.9 out of 10 100% real reviews

The 2 most helpful reviews based on 71 reviews:

15 Jan 2009 Janet, Hampshire

10

Good Points

Easy to set up, colours good, speed good. It's great that the flap opens automatically to print the paper. The main reason for purchasing this printer was the wireless capability and it has not let us down at all - it works great. I was worried about setting it up as I am no 'techie' but I followed the instructions and only had one hitch (because I didn't read them properly), but I just went back into setup and was fine. Scanner and copying work well too - it's so much easier if you just want to copy as you don't have to log onto a computer. So far so good and it was definately the right choice after much searching and reading reviews.

Bad Points

None really - more of wish that it could do double sided printing. It has to places to pick paper and it would have been to have these on the same side instead of opposite ends.

07 Feb 2009 Anonymous verified purchaser

9

Good Points

Quiet, quick, excellent print quality. Efficient scanner and copier. Not too large.

Bad Points

Paper tray fiddly and irritating. Ink more expensive than my last printer even though you only need to replace the cartridge that has run out. This is because you cannot use compatible cartridges because they come without the chip and you have to transfer this from the original cartridge. I did try this but it was a nightmare and after all my efforts the printer would not recognise the cartridge.

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