Canon Multifunction Printer
Many offices have a Canon multifunction printer and are considered by many businesses an excellent addition to their workplaces. They offer several devices in one unit which ultimately saves money because they require less space and energy. They're popular in home offices too for this reason. The company has a wide variety of printers available but each can generally be put into one of two categories: office all-in-ones or photo all-in-ones.
Office All-in-ones
There are plenty of all-in-one printers by Canon and the company creates ones for every budget. For the home office there's the Pixma MX300 which can retail for under $100. The unit weighs a little over 15 pounds and is a fax, copier, scanner and printer in one. It prints color (17 pages per minute) and black-and-white (22 pages per minute).
Reviewers say the Pixma MX300 provides fast photo prints (make sure you use the right type of photo paper) and that it has lots of capacity options when it comes time to replace the ink. The machine also has memory to store incoming faxes for later printing. The downside of the MX300 is that it has no memory card slots, it's not network ready and it doesn't have a backlit LCD. It's good for a home office with limited printing or a small business with a one-person office.
If you have a little more money to spare for a printer, you may want to consider the Canon MF8030Cn. It's a printer, scanner and copier, and is a good option for the home user who wants a quality machine and doesn't need a fax. It's compact and easy to use. It's also network-ready which makes it suitable for a larger-than-one-man office.
Another economical option is the Pixma MP280. It's said to have exceptional text and image output. But it is a no frills option with very few other features. The most appealing aspect of the MP280 is its cost (as low as $40). It's good for a home office and does a respectable job printing pictures as long as you have a good photo paper. It can also print web pages and stills from movies. The control panel can be a bit difficult to understand and the black ink cartridges are very expensive. But you can cut down on costs by using inkjet refills.
A larger business may want to take a look at the Canon MF9280cdn. It's ideal for multi-user offices and has a LDAP address book that allows documents to instantly be seen. The machine can print 22 pages per minute in both black-and-white and color, and it is known for creating crisp prints where the finer details aren't lost. With the MF9280cdn you can print from directly from USBs and the user-friendly menu makes it easy to get around the machine. The machine has two USB ports and memory card slots. The printer can print, scan, copy and fax.
The MF9280cdn has a built-in Ethernet port for PC faxing, scanning and network printing. It's also a Canon Generation Green printer and has an energy-saving mode that uses only 1W of energy.
Photo All-in-Ones
Photo all-in-one printers from Canon are designed mostly for accurate color capture to capture the smallest details in prints. Most have print/copy/scan functions but do not have fax capability. There are models with eight-color inks and six-color inks and many of the models also have special grey inks and reservoirs for two black inks to create the most accurate colors possible. They're designed to print on matte paper, glossy paper and some can print directly on CDs. Many allow you to print directly from a camera phone, digital camera or through the use of infrared connections, Bluetooth connection or with media card slots or PictBridge ports.
Examples of photo all-in-ones include the MP190, MP240, Mp480, MP620 and MP980.