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- Average user rating: 2.5 stars out of 98 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
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14 out of 14 people found this review helpful
2.0 stars
"Good price, does lots of stuff, but two problems I could not live with."
Pros: Good price, duplex printing and copying, sheet feeder, fast printing, good quality text.
Cons: Large, heavy, very noisy mechanics, colors in photos incorrect, scanner calibrates every time it scans.
Summary: I was very excited about getting my MP830. I haven?t bought a new printer for about 5 years and have been searching for the right all-in-one for me. The MP830 is big? and heavy. I noticed that in the store, but it got bigger as I was lugging it up my stairs, and when I put it on my desk.
Setup was fairly easy, and took about as much time as expected considering all of its functions, about 45 minutes. This process went without any problems, and no surprises. The sheet feeder operated as advertised, and was fairly quick. The duplex printing was outstanding. Except for a slight delay after retracting the sheets following printing side one, it was very fast and the document looked great.
A major problem though, was a very loud ?clacking? and ?clunking? of the plastic paper handling mechanisms inside the printer. This occurred with every print job, and was so loud that I though it was braking. This happened with the rear paper feed and the cassette, regardless of the type of paper I loaded. When the printing was actually occurring it was quiet, but while it was preparing the print heads and grabbing the paper? Plug your ears! There was also a slight problem with the auto-opening paper output tray. It often would not open until I jiggled the cassette which seemed to bind with it along the bottom. The cassette is made of cheap plastic and does not seat exactly correct.
Photos printed very fast. But, it washed out faces on several prints, and on others the faces were OK but the other colors were too dark. Perhaps there was a fix for this, but I did not find one while searching the Canon knowledge base. I hate knowledge bases. Takes way too much time and Canon?s did not seem very complete.
Scanning quality was good, although unlike my previous Canon scanner that would calibrate every once in a while (rarely, actually), the MP830 calibrated every time I scanned, although the calibration seemed to go more quickly than my previous scanner, it was still annoying that it did it on every scan. Oh, my prior research indicated that you could select an application to send the scans to (i.e. a photo editor) but it?s only a choice of their software applications or email, none of which are a photo editor. But, you can call the scanner up as a TWAIN device from within your own applications.
I did not try any fax functions.
CONCLUSION: The price is right, plenty of functionality and easy set up. In the end though, I was unwilling to settle for the inconsistent photo colors, and the loud noises generated with each print job. I returned the MP830 for a refund. Too bad, because I believe I would have been happy otherwise.
