Canon Pixma MX860

Pros: Acceptable printing speed. Good and fast draft prints and copies. Quiet operation. Text quality is nearly laser sharp. Very good photo quality. Duplex printing and copying. Software that works well, unlike HP.

Cons: Can NOT produce proper COPY of documents with margins less than 0.25 inches. Borderless copy doesn't help. Can't print from USB keys. Poorly designed USB slot barely fits average USB key. No document preview on copy and scan on the LCD like HP has.

Summary: Let me start with the bad. I've been bugging Canon support for the past several days because I discovered a big flaw in the COPY feature of the printer. MX860 is utterly incapable of producing a copy of the document that has side margins less than 0.25 inches. If you have an 8.5x11 document with small margins that you want to copy, too bad you'll have to scan to PC first and then reprint, otherwise your margins will be partially cut off. I've tried everything Fit To Page which should be designed just for cases like this, borderless copy, size reduction. I can reduce the doc to 25% original size and still the margin adjacent to the initial horizontal edge of the printer will be messed up. I do not believe this is a defect of my particular printer and the tech support didn't say that either. I've sent them scanned samples of my copies to show them that no method can be used to make such a copy successfully. It has been very frustrating and just today my wife asked me to make a copy of some document the credit card company sent her and I couldn't do it on MX860. I am actually comparing MX860 to HP Photosmart C7280. Canon kills the HP in text quality and sharpness as well as better photo quality especially on Standard quality setting. But when it comes to making copies of such documents, HP easily archives the desired result using Fit To Page. Canon, what were you thinking?

In addition, try placing a 4x6 photo starting in the corner where the arrow on the flatbed marks the starting position. You will end up with a copy of the photo that is missing 0.25inches on one of its sides. You will have to move the photo away from the scanner edge to get a proper copy.

Needless to say I am very annoyed with this AIO at this point. If you are not bothered by such an issue, this is a very good all around AIO with some very useful extra features. Scanning straight to PDF is very good one and so is duplex copying (unless you have a doc with those margins). Very good quality printing.

But for it's flaw the machine is getting 3 stars from me. If that copy wasn't an issue it would have been 4 or maybe even 4.5.

BTW tech support said they will forward my comments to the customer feedback program. There is nothing they an do just as I thought. Unless enough people complain it maybe a while before this is fixed, if ever.

Updated on Mar 24, 2009

I'd like to make a correction, I wrote "margin adjacent to the initial horizontal edge of the printer" what I meant was "margin adjacent to the initial horizontal edge of the flatbed scanner"...