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.

I purchased this printer after quite a bit of research as my previous all in one had worked well for many years and I was concerned that I would have problems setting it up.

In the event it was much easier than I thought. I am in the 65+ age group and I did not want too many fiddley things in dark recesses. I had not inserted a print head previously and I had 5 cartridges this time instead of just two.

However, everything went well. Printing both single and double sided works great. Printing directly on to DVDs is fine provided you have the correct surface , as any DVD will not do, you will just get a mess.

So far I have not been able to send a fax. I don't know why, possible I am missing some thing very basic.

Scans very well, which was not always the case with my old printer.


All in all a good purchase. Worth the money.

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!)

I'm not very IT literate but I thought the instructions were poor, the diagrams hard to read and the set up not easy. To this day, I still can't find the "paper tray" the software keeps defaulting to. I use the feeder instead and that only supports the paper on one side, so printing isn't always straight. The scanner isn't very user friendly e.g. it defaults to a new folder in the scanner menu each time rather than the folder you want to save to and I haven't found how to correct that. Also, there was no lead to connect the printer to the PC. You have to buy that separately (no warning of this when you purchase and my last printer came with a lead built into the printer end, so I couldn't re-use it). Finally, there are only 3 colour tones and that seems to make the colour quality poor. The cannon website wasn't any help to me (it doesn't seem to list this printer and seems to cater for business users and retailers). I had an Epsom before, and I think I'll go back to that next time. Maybe computer literate people will laugh at my naïveté but my feeling is that this Cannon is not for an unsophisticated user like me who just want a plug and use a printer.