Canon is a familiar printer brand and we are lucky to have a Canon printer with us to test. The Pixma MX927 is an all-in-one printer that supports wireless printing for small to medium sized offices and it will be interesting to see how it performs printing photos.
The Pixma MX927 has a slew of neat features and I’d like to mention those before tackling the print quality for photos, starting with the all-in-one design. The Pixma MX927 can print, scan, copy, and fax documents ““ these vital and common tasks in the office are handled by the Pixma MX927 with ease.
Dedicated buttons are available to select the different modes of the printer and a 3″ LCD displays the different settings for each mode. You might think that a multi-function device like this would have a lot of buttons, but Canon cleverly designed a keypad that changes as we switch between modes. The variable keypad is back lit and the values are not printed on the button. This makes the Pixma MX927 look uncluttered and easy to use because we are only presented with buttons that we need for a specific mode.
We can actually use the Pixma MX927 without a computer. We just have to refer to the LCD screen to manage out tasks. We can plug a USB flash drive or set it up to access the internet to download and print files without using a PC.
The Pixma MX927 is also WiFi ready and I did not have any troubles setting it up with my home network. We can set up Pixma Could Link to print files from popular cloud solutions like Dropbox or Evernote, or photos from Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter. The Pixma MX927 is also Google Cloud Print ready so we can print files from our Google accounts. We can also setup an email address for the Pixma MX927 ““ any attachment sent to the email with be printed right away.
Compatible with Apple’s AirPrint, printing photos and documents from our iOS devices are done without any issues. But Canon is not contented with AirPrint, so they have an app for us. The Canon Easy-PhotoPrint app is available in iTunes for free and it has more options than AirPrint like picking paper sizes and printing as photos are taken. The app can also be used to receive scanned documents and print documents. Android and Windows devices can also partake of this fee app.
The printer has a top loading tray to facilitate scanning or copying multiple documents so that we don’t need to flip pages one at a time. The printer also has 2 trays for small photo papers and a bigger tray for common office document sizes like A4. Speaking of documents, another nice feature of the Pixma MX927 is having a dedicated black ink tank for documents and separate ink tanks for printing colored files. This means that we can print black and white documents even if the other colored ink tanks are empty, and also works the other way around while printing photos.
With that, let us segue to the focus of my attention. The all-in-one can scan, copy, fax and print without much ado, but how well does it print photos? As a photo enthusiast, I managed to stock up of some photos and this is a rare opportunity to actually see them printed out. I didn’t follow any real scientific approach for these test, and for what it’s worth, I think the print outs look OK while printing at the best quality. Printing with AirPrint will always print at the best quality and the colors on the print out match the colors on an iOS screen.
While on a PC or a Mac (a Mac in my case) more printing options can be tinkered around with to get varying results. Selecting the correct color profile is key here to get the colors correctly on screen and on print. Some color profiles yielded washed out colors while other color profiles ended up with overly red print outs. After a trial and error process, I picked out the best available color profile, but a more sophisticated and accurate process can be performed to create a specific color profile for the Canon MX927″¦but that’s a whole new topic.
The next and last key option is the print quality. The standard quality was very disappointing on the MX927. The images came out brighter than they should and had evident lines running across the image. The lines look like overlaps of ink as the printer head moved along the paper as it printed. So despite being a more economical print quality, I would not use the standard print quality for my photos at all. The good news is that the best or highest quality yielded very good print outs. The colors are almost spot on”¦just a tad bit darker with the color profile I had. The print out also do not exhibit those lines that I saw with the standard quality print. Another nice thing about the Pixma MX927 is that the photos come out dry, so we don’t need to wait for the ink to dry up and settle into the paper.
Despite the pleasing results that I got with the printed out photos using the best quality, I would still prefer having my photos printed in a photo lab. Photo labs use better photo papers that are more durable with different types too. And with the price of the ink cartridges, printing at a photo lab is still more economical. But for photos that I need to print in a pinch, printing with the MX927 is a really convenient and good quality option. And don’t forget that the Pixma MX927 can also print, scan, copy and fax documents. You can buy the Pixma MX927 for Php12,995 and is available at authorized Canon resellers around the country.
Canon Adds Four Wireless Printers to its PIXMA Line