Home > Consumer Reviews > Canon PIXMA MX850 Multi Function Printer

Fairly straightforward to set up though needed help from more computer literate 18 year old!Really quite a big printer.Needed to put an extra extension on my desk.I needed for printing batches of 100-300 newsletters and invitations etc for voluntary business purposes.This is perfect for my needs and does beautiful and speedy work on card and paper.Colours are perfect.Really pleased with this purchase.

Its clearly pot luck whether you stand a chance of getting this machine working. Three hours of wasted time and no drivers, no prints, everything installed, uninstalled (what a nightmare that was), several times, plugged and re-plugged.

The installer says if you have problems (they know many do), go to the manual, the manual says use the instruction sheet, the instruction sheet says follow the on screen instructions - which say use the manual----

Finally I go to Canon customer services on the web...."Sorry, service unavailable".

As far as I am concerned this machine is not fit for purpose and I will be demanding a full refund or taking legal action. Things should work better than this in this day and age.

I am not stupid, have installed many printers in the past, and am using XP SP2.

BE WARNED

I run a small business from home and after my Dell all in one and my fax machine stopped working at the same time I decided to get a 4-in-one machine. I've used all the facilities and am overall very impressed. The machine takes up quite a lot of desk space but as I have a dedicated office this isn't a problem. Set up was time consuming but not complicated (although I did get a bit confused when setting up the printer heads). Faxes are clear and sharp and so far I'm impressed with the printing.

I particularly wanted a decent scanner and was a little worried by some of the reviews I read, but it's hard to get a machine to do everything really well. Quite a few of the scanner settings don't produce very clear images but after some trial and error (and I'll admit a moment of thinking perhaps I should send it back and try something else!) I figured out that if you scan and save as a pdf the image is excellent.

All in all a very good machine. Quite pricey when you think what you can get for half the price, but the spec and long term lower ink costs make it a best buy (incidentally I think it is a Which? Best Buy!)

Bought this to replace my aging HP printer which had done an excellent job for 7 years! The Cannon MX850 was the Best Buy from "Which" Computer on VFM overall so went for it. It is quite excellent and is in a different league from my HP. The print is so clear and the ink dries much faster that the old printer. Photos look good too but obiously the print time is longer than that for documents. The copying is quick and effective and the software that is supplied has so much good stuff on it.
I would have given it 5 stars but it is very large and takes up a lot of space in my small office! Overall though, that is minor and a price well worth in order to get this type of quality.

For home printing and scanning I was using a Lexmark Z33 printer (which gave poor quality and expensive prints of both documents and photos) and a separate Epson Scanner.

The recent breakdown of the Scanner and my dissatifaction with the printer persuaded me to seek a suitable all-in-one option as a replacement which I could also as a photocopier when necessary.

After looking at a number of alternatives the Canon product appeared to tick all the right boxes and so far it appears to have been an excellent buy.

The initial set-up was easy and the included software makes it simple to use. The quality and cost of printing is vastly superior to my previous printer and although the unit is rather large it takes up less desk area than the printer plus scanner that it replaced.

Overall I am delighted with this purchase and would strongly recommend it to any home user.