The
Canon Pixma MP760 Photo All in One is one of the most feature packed models in Canon s lines of inkjet printers and multifunction units, lacking only the sheet feeder for the flat bed scanner and a standalone fax (which is included on the slightly less photo capable but comparably priced MP780). The MP760 offers the following feature set, features which meet or exceed my expections, and which will likely please most users...
- Flatbed scanner with slide/filmstrip adapter, max document size 8.5" X 11.7"
- Flashcard slots for SD, Compactflash, memory stick and Smartmedia. (no xD slot)
- borderless photo printing
- 5-color ink system, four dye-based inks, one pigment-based black cartridge (all full cartridges included!)
- 2400 x 4800 dpi scanner
- film and slide scanner
- two paper trays
- two sided printing
- 2.5" color LCD, displays images from flashcard slots and scans, can be rotated up or down for the best viewing angles.
- PictBridge compatible
- nominal 25 page per minute printing for text in draft mode
The print head in our
Canon F30 multifunction printer/copier/scanner, which is used fairly heavily in a piano studio in our home, needed replacement. The replacement print head runs about $60-80, more than I wanted to put into a printer purchased in 2001, even though I felt this printer had been a great purchase. The MP760 printer features were similar to a terrific
Canon Pixma 3000 that I already own, same ink cartridges, and similar printing features, so we ended up buying this printer/copier as a replacement.
In a few words...... The MP760 is not perfect, there's no xD card slot, film scanning is really slow, and this printer requires a
LOT of space. But it handles just about everything else quite well, and it has the satisfying "look and feel" of an expensive printer. The MP760 produces solid high quality text quickly and cheaply. The same can be said of photographs. Scan quality is also very good, and scan speed using the flat bed scanner is quite good. The color LCD display is not a gimmick, it makes it a lot easier to print directly from flashcards or scans, as well as providing clearer access to the onboard menu options. On the downside, the menu options are many, making me occasionally wish the user interface was a little more intuitive, its not bad, but its not obvious how to do everything. The software package (Arcsoft PhotoStudio and Omnipage SE) is at least adequate for most home users, though I wouldn't have minded if they had included Paperport for organizing scanned images. More than other printer manufacturers, Canon seems to be trying to provide a printer that provides the most benefit for the least cost over the printer's life, and not just the lowest up front cost. The details follow below....
Setup When you first see the MP760 you ll be struck by two things, first it is
BIG, and second, it appears to be very solidly built. Then when you use it, you ll quickly notice how quiet it is, which furthers the impression you ll not be disappointed with the quality.
In the box is the Pixma MP760, print head, 5 ink tanks, power cord, Mac and PC software cd s, fold out 1 page glossy installation guide, 38 page quick start guide, and sample pack of photo paper. Setup starts with emptying the box and removing the packing tape from the printer, of which there must have been 50 pieces carefully placed to prevent any damage to the printer during shipment.
The first step was to install the print head and cartridges, and let the printer run through an alignment cycle, which it handled without any intervention from me. As with most USB devices, I was then asked to install all the software, prior to connecting the USB cable. In addition to the printer driver and HTML versions of the manuals for the printer and some of the software, the following software is installed during the installation
- EasyPhotoPrint and Easy WebPrint (Canon software, one for printing and editing photos, another which integrates with Internet Explorer and helps format web pages for printing
- MP Navigator, a Canon Scanner utility
- Arcsoft Photostudio
- Scansoft Omnipage SE (OCR software)
During the installation I also loaded standard 8 1/2 X 11 inkjet paper in the paper tray on the back of the printer, and then put 4X6 photo paper in the cassette tray below the printer. The back tray is exposed, but the cassette is completely closed, protecting your expensive photo paper.
When not in use, the printer can be completely closed (except for the rear paper tray) protecting the ink jet and paper feed mechanisms, the flash card slots, and any photo paper in the bottom cassette. The front door on the printer opens automatically when you start to print, quietly and smoothly,and serves at the output paper tray.
Using the Pixma MP760 Copying Having a standalone copymachine is more useful that I ever would have thought. Its the single feature that "gets" all-in-one printers noticed. The MP760 is the fastest inkjet copier I ve used, and it offers the widest range of options that I ve seen.
Pushing the
Copy button on the brings up the COPY dialogue on the color LCD screen. From this dialogue, you can monitor the copy settings and ink levels, and adjust the copy options, which include .
-number of copies
-copy darkness (exposure density
-print quality (normal, fine or fast)
-paper size and type
- reducing/enlarging ratio (25% to 400%, or fit to page)
- two sided copying (duplexing)
- Special options (two pages reduced to one, a quarter page document copied to 4 to a page, sticker sheet copying ,fade correction for faded images)
- paper type and size (photo, plain, etc)
Black and white copying is fast, and the copy quality is excellent in normal mode.. From a cold start, the MP760 takes about 15 seconds to warm up and ~12 seconds to copy a page of sheet music in
fast mode. After the first page (warm start), each additional page takes about 15 seconds. In normal mode, about 20-25 seconds are required to scan and print a page, and about 50 seconds are required in
fine mode. (Copy times seem to vary somewhat based on the complexity of the original and whether or not the unit is warmed up)
Using any of the special options slows the process, but not unacceptably. Copying two single pages onto one two sided page takes about 2 minutes and 20 seconds in
normal mode, ~10-15 seconds to scan the first page (after which you re prompted to place the second page on the unit), ~10-15 seconds to scan the second page, and then a little less than 2 minutes to print. The MP760 prints the first side of the page, then quietly pulls the page back into the printer and prints the second page on the reverse side of the paper. Copying and enlarging is pretty quick also, requiring about 30 seconds to enlarge a half page document to a full page printout, for example.
Color copying takes a bit longer, but is still pretty fast. Copying a full page color document to plain paper in fast mode takes about 25 seconds in fast mode, 35 in normal mode, and just under 2 minutes in fine mode.
Copies made in fast mode are a little light, but contain plenty of detail and are easy to read, light enough that I suspect they require significantly less ink. Normal mode copies are true to the original, and fine mode copies are only slightly better, perhaps with a little better contrast to distinguish between different shades of dark colors. Most users will be thrilled with normal mode, and will only use fine mode for printing on photo paper. The level of detail is excellent, color accuracy appears to be very good, and I detect no banding, even in large areas of one solid color.
Copying photographs works acceptably well, though I find that colors on the copies appear to have slightly less contrast, and colors pick up a slighty redder tint. Its not something you d notice when you pick up the copy by itself, but when a copy is compared to the original in bright lighting you can see small differences. The MP760 adds no errors or artifacts to the copies, no dust specks, etc. Copying a 4 X 6 photograph to the same size photo paper takes about 55 seconds.
Printing After you push the print button in MS Word, the MP760 takes a few seconds to launch a print status window and start printing (around 10 seconds to start a 7 page Word document on a 750mhz Athlon PC running Windows XP). Printing full pages of single spaced
text in draft mode takes 5 seconds per page, for a total of about 45 seconds to print my 7 page document. In draft mode, the text is sharp and clear, but its slightly less dark than standard mode , which is only a little slower than draft (about 7 seconds per page), the the benefit of sharper and blacker text. Canon rates this printer at 25 pages per minute, a speed you can approach printing double spaced text pages in draft mode with all the settings optimized for speed.
Printing documents which contain
text and graphics, like most web pages, takes a little longer. To test printing composite documents, I first called up the print driver and used the Canon print advisor dialogue to optimize settings for this type of document. Using the recommended settings for text and graphics documents, about 3 minutes were required to print 8 pages of very fine text with lots of graphics from a fairly busy web page, a little slower than I liked. Colors were bright and accurate, and images were sharp, with good contrast. In draft mode, a little less than 2 minutes were required to print the same web page, which looked almost as good as the standard mode printout, but with less bright colors and text that was a little less black.
Printing a single 4X6
Photo on Canon glossy photo paper takes about 70 seconds if you use Canon s Easy Photo print application. Easy photo print offers a quick wizard interface for printing excellent photo s but offers almost few knobs for tweaking your photo's or printing, and its slower than other applications. Printing the same image, using the standard print settings for photo s, from the include Arcsoft Photostudio takes about 53 seconds, the main difference being the time it takes the printer to get started. Each additional print takes about 45 seconds. Using the highest quality print setting from the same software slows the print time back to 70 seconds, with almost no improvement in quality. Full page photo prints take 130 (normal) to 190 (high) seconds to print.
I compared a few prints of the same image (one of which was a full page print of the TSS Printer test document downloaded from http://www.inkjetart.com/custom/) on the MP760, an Epson R200, and an HP 7760 photo printer, using the software which came from each printer. At first glance all the photo s looked very good, and similar. Close inspection showed that images printed on the new HP 7760 and Canon MP7760 were better, with brighter colors and more discernable detail, if you looked very closely. Comparing detail with a magnifying glass helped distinguish between the images, and indicated the MP was slightly better in many cases, clearly better than the Epson R200, and only arguably slightly more capable than the HP (perhaps). The MP760 is a fast, very good photo printer, and I doubt you could find a better photo printing multifunction device in or near this price range.
Scanning Launching Canon s
MP Navigator application gives user a wizard interface to access the scanning features (and flash card readers) and acquire image files, and then feed those files to the OCR and photo editing applications that would use the scanned documents.
The MP760 and Omnipage SE
OCR capabilities are excellent, and I was able to convert scans of standard text documents to new documents very accurately, with a very high success rate, 99% or more. The only real problems I noted were with identifying punctuation marks correctly, occasionally an underscore ( _ ) or quotation mark ( ) would be missed or identified as something else. Omnipage picked up italics and bold text also, and when I tried to scan text documents with images it usally placed the images correctly also, though it seemed to struggle a little with text in the images.
Photo scanning is another strong point of the MP760. If you have a bunch of old photo s you want to scan, you can place several photo s on the scanner at once, and MP Navigator will scan the images, and then crop and separate them into individual files on the fly. At that point, with one more click, you can launch the ArcSoft PhotoStudio software with the scanned images ready to edit. I found scanning images at 300dpi to be a little soft for enlargements, though 400 and 600 dpi works. 600dpi scanning is slow, though, especially on the 750mhz athlon PC I am using with the scanner. The MP760 adds no artifacts to the images, and colors are reproduced accurately.
Scan times for image, time from start scan till images are loading into Arcsoft Photostudio:
Two 3X5 photos @ 300dpi 1 minute
Two 3X5 photos @ 400dpi 2.5 minutes
Two 3X5 photos @ 600dpi 4 minutes
The document cover above the flat bed scanning table houses another light source and the guides for both film strips and slides, making
slide and film scanning possible. Both the light and guides are conveniently stored (and hidden) behind a protective cover integral to the scanning lid, but are easily accessed when needed. Up to 4 slides or six negatives can be scanned at a time. Slides and/or film strips can be scanned from the MP760 control panel and then printed to photo paper without using your PC, or you can use the MP Navigator to step you through the process, creating digital images to be saved on your PC.
Scanning film strips and slides works better than you might expect with a multifunction printer, but it is slow. The default scanning resolution for film strips is 1200 dpi. When I scanned some old 35mm film strips (about 12 years old), it took 5 minutes or more per negative to scan the images into my PC. The results were good, allowing decent 4X6 prints, but not good enough to use the images for full page prints, the detail was just not sharp enough. Scanning at lower resolutions is much faster, but quality is compromised.
Some of the film strip images I scanned appeared to be faded. On a couple of those I enabled the
Fade Correction option built into the MP760, and printed those images on 4X6 Canon glossy photo paper directly from the control panel. The results were dramatic, image quality was improved a lot, colors were brighter and closer to what I expected. I ve found the Fade Correction also works well when copying and reprinting old photos directly from the MP760.
Using the flash Card Reader Printing images directly from flash cards without turning on your PC is another nice feature. If you insert a flashcard with image files into the MP760, the first image will display on the 2.5 LCD, and you can scroll through the images to find one to print. Even cropping images from the MP760 controls is possible, and its fairly intuitive to do so. There s also the index sheet option, where thumbnail images of all the images on a flash card are printed on a single sheet of paper. You then select images to print by filling in a circle next to the image (like taking a standardized test), and then letting the MP760 scan the index sheet to determine which images to print. Other options you can select from the index sheet include paper size and type, number of copies (1-3), which paper feed tray is used, noise reduction, date print, vivid photo (brightens all colors), borderless printing and more.
Cost of Ownership The MP 760 uses uses 5 ink cartridges, 4 dye based inks (magenta, yellow, cyan, black) for photo printing and one larger pigment based black ink cartridge for text printing. The dye based ink cartridges run $10-$12 each, while the larger black text cartridge costs about $12-$15. Most reviews I ve read indicate that Canon printers are the most economical available, which has been my experience also.
Canon rates the black cartridge at 1500 pages of text containing 1500 characters, at the standard print setting. (I find my MS Word documents, which are single spaced, contain about 2000-2500 characters per page, while double spaced pages contain around 1500 characters). On average, printing b/w text documents will about a penny per page, about the best you can find with an inkjet printer.
The color cartridges are rated for about 400-500 pages per cartridge at 5% coverage. Printing documents with a few color graphics or text will run 3-5 cents per page.
I also expect photo printing to be economical. As I write this, I ve printed or copied almost 100 pages of text or text plus graphics, 20 4X6 photo s and 3 8.5X1l photo s on a new set of ink cartridges. The Canon software still shows the cartridges to be full. I ve pulled the cartridges out and looked at them (they re clear), and they really are full. (I expect I could get more than 300 prints from a full set of ink cartridges if that was all I printed. If I had printed these same documents on my
Epson R200 (another pretty good printer), the ink levels would be down substantially.) Based on this experience, and my experience with a Canon iP3000 and reviews of similar Canon models (the ip4000) at other review sites like Tom s hardware, I expect the ink costs per photo prints to be no more than 15 cents per print. Canon glossy photo paper lists for about 25 cents per 4 X 6 sheet sheet, and is on sale every month or two at Office Depot and other stores, which gives a total 4X6 print cost of 20 cents to 40 cents per print, depending on how aggressively you price shop, not a bargain, but about as good as you can do using manufacturer branded ink and paper.
