This printer was purchased for use in a home setting to print a few documents a week. Its responsibilities have grown to supporting two post-graduate degree programs, a small business, and working from home for a large business. I consider this to be a cheapo printer, since we paid $99 for it. Initially the price made me suspicious, but after reading a bunch of Amazon reviews, I was convinced that this was the right one for me. We’ve had it about year and this thing’s holding up just fine.
In the past, I purchased printers based on what the best direct deal was at the local department store. More than once, this has come around to bite me in ink costs and user frustration. This printer falls into the affordable ink and low frustration category. The ink cartridges can be replaced per color, meaning if you run out of blue, you don’t have to replace all the other colors even though they’re still full. Just replace the blue (or as printer people call it, Cyan). There are two black tanks – one’s the size of all the other cartridges, the other is double the size. I don’t read instructions, so I’m just going to have to assume that the double-sized one is for everyday, non-photo printing (the stuff you do the most – presumably twice as much as photo printing). That means the other black must be for printing photos. Who knows? I just know I only have to replace one of them at a time, and not ALL of them at once.
“Easiest” Printer I’ve Ever Owned
Frustration-wise, this cheapo printer has been a dream. I’ve owned bells-and-whistles $300+ printers and they’ve been a pain from so many angles. In particular, I get frustrated with installation. I’d say that this printer is par with the industry as far as installed bloatware is concerned. Two nice things about this printer’s installation: (1) it’s fast, and (2) you can uninstall most of the bloatware and the printer still works. In the past, my top-shelf printers have required a 300 meg download and 30-45 minutes to finish installing all the junk – junk that’s seemingly woven into the fabric of the printer’s existence – remove the junk an kill the printer. Not the Canon PIXMA MX892: you can kick its junk and it still works.
This is the second WiFi printer I’ve owned and I can’t believe we ever hooked these things up with wires before. As far as WiFi printers go, this one is pretty simple. If you have a wireless router and your home wireless network set up already, you just use the menus on the printer to find the network and connect to it. No harder than connecting your Android or iPad to the wireless. The installation software also has a tool for connecting to the network, which works just fine. Canon has a cloud print service that helps with printing from mobile devices, but I get frustrated with ALL attempts at printing from my Android or iPad so I just give up and forward the doc to my laptop. The new version of this printer, the Canon PIXMA MX922, supports Apple’s AirPrint. From what I understand, this truly simplifies the process of printing from an Apple mobile device.
Scanning’s not hard either. Once you install all the software, the printer sort of just figures out what to connect to. You hit the scan button, pick from the list of computers, and the scans just show up on the computer. This feature is not unique to Canon, however, it has been the most successful of all the printers I’ve owned. Other printers would pretend like they were sending the scan, but nothing ever showed up. Or your computer would just hang for an hour until you lost patience an restarted. The Canon is all good – no hangs, no pretending, just scans.
NOTE:We own a Canon PIXMA MX892. This review is about the Canon PIXMA MX892. The links and images I have posted, however, are for the newer model of this printer, the PIXMA MX922. Ordinarily I would not do this, but the prices for the MX892 have jumped significantly due to low quantities/being out of production. I have no doubt that the MX922 is just as great based on the 4/5-star Amazon rating from 3,900+ reviews. Also, I have a buddy that owns the new version and has all the same nice things to say about it.
Canon PIXMA MX922 Wireless Color Photo Printer with Scanner, Copier and Fax
