Canon MP800 review

You must have very particular needs if you can justify buying a standalone consumer scanner these days.

Likewise, a solo inkjet feels like a job half done, particularly when it's stacked against the likes of Canon's MP800, perhaps the best inkjet all-in-one device yet produced.

It starts as soon as you open the box: setup is a breeze. Once you've flipped up the scanning bed, the print head repositions itself to take the cartridges -five of them, two of which are black. Nothing unusual there, except that when you clip a cartridge into place, its whole front lights up to tell you it's properly seated. This is a very neat idea, and one of which we heartily approve.

You feed the paper into the printer from one of two hoppers - one sticking up from the back and one that slides in at the front - and select the active tray via either a button on the case or a menu in the driver. This means you can load different media types at the same time, or perhaps plain paper at the back and headed frontispieces down below.

Beyond the glossy black casing, there are some smart design touches, such as the way the output tray automatically folds down if you start printing while it's closed, and the built-in duplexer around the back, which is so slim we didn't believe it had been included until we tried it out. With a lightbox in the lid for scanning slides and transparencies, media card slots in the front and a PictBridge USB port down below, the only thing missing is a Bluetooth dongle, which is an optional add-on.

We ran our standard suite of printing tests and were impressed by how it performed, not least in terms of speed. Five closely typed pages sent its way from Word were ready for collection just 32 seconds later. You'd expect feathered edges at that rate, but we couldn't fault the results. Large characters were bold and dense, while those shrunk down to 9pt were crisp, with razor-sharp descenders, even on plain photocopier paper.

Switching to photo paper upped the quality, yet a multi-layered 6.4MB PDF still rendered in 44 seconds and printed in 51 more from a 1.5GHz PowerBook G4. This was impressive, as was the output. The image it contained was put together in Illustrator, with extensive use of Gradient Mesh, and the colour transitions were as smooth on the page as they had been on screen. There was no stepping and no evidence of any bleed where contrasting colours butted up against one another.

To test the scanner, we put this image back onto the glass, a further sheet of photo paper into the hopper and hit Copy. We were impressed that the lamp took less than 20 seconds to warm up, after which the copy was completed in one minute 27 seconds. The colours in the derivative work were slightly muted when compared side by side with the original, but you'd never notice unless you compared them side by side.

You control the copier with a series of hardware buttons and a menu on the generous 3.5in screen. Canon's long history of producing office equipment comes to the fore here, as the display exactly mimics that found on full-blown photocopiers, with one-touch access to copy quantities and options for lightening or darkening the output. Submenus, meanwhile, let you copy double-sided documents or shrink multiple pages onto a single side to save paper.

We slipped it a sheet of typewritten text and had five mono copies in 47 seconds for an average of 9.4 seconds per page. That's not as fast as a dedicated photocopier - the one in the MacUser office completed the same task in 22 seconds - but this is a considerably cheaper device.