Canon i-SENSYS MF8580Cdw review

At this price, Canon’s stated speed of 20 pages per minute (ppm) in black or colour isn’t especially impressive, but the MF8580Cdw isn’t too sluggish in practice. It produced our black text test at 16.5ppm, and our more complex colour graphics test at 14.7ppm, which is quite a quick result. We were happy with its very sharp black text, and reasonably so with its colour graphics, although these appeared grainy in places. Colour photos were a touch too warm and vivid for our liking, and we couldn’t find a setting to get them just as we wanted. By contrast, our black-and-white test photo printed with a subtle blue-green tone, but was completely neutral when printed via the USB host port.

A pictorial in the Android app suggests that jobs are sent to the printer via the Cloud, even when MFP and phone are on the same network. We’re not sure if this is the case, but the printer was incredibly slow to start printing our test job; so much so that in the meantime we’d assumed it had failed and had moved on to some other tests.

Canon’s PC scan interface is one of our favourites, and here it makes scanning a simple affair, while providing advanced options for those who want them; the software is massively better than HP’s equivalent. One foible of this MFP is that you must use the control panel on the device to place it in remote scanner mode when you want to scan either from PC software or a mobile app; it’s a frustration if you forget to do this when placing the original document. Scans were very quick up to the 600 dots per inch (dpi) maximum. Although it’s unusual for a scanner in this class to not support 1,200dpi, our results were much better than typical for a laser MFP, with a particularly high dynamic range preserving detail from among the lightest and darkest shades.

This printer takes just four consumables, all held in a drawer which pulls out easily, but they’re available only with a modest 3,400-page capacity. Using these, running costs work out at 9.9p for a black and colour page, which isn’t cheap, and the black component of this is a particularly high 2.2p. Although we don’t usually include multi-pack pricing in our running cost calculations, the black toner is available in a twin pack, which reduces black costs to 1.7p per page. Even so, despite its strengths, this MFP still isn’t particularly good value to buy or run.