Hello once again. It’s been a while since I got any reviews online, but today is your lucky day. Our pals at Geeks.com continue to provide goodies for review, and today I’ll be taking a look at the Canon PIXMA MP980 All-in-One. It’s a nice printer that can be connected to your home or office network via wired or wireless connection that offers a good many functions, nice inkjet print quality and an LCD panel for operation. Let’s take a look.
Info:
Canon PIXMA MP980 All-in-One Printer
The Canon PIXMA MP980 Wireless All-in-One printer has all the features you need for a home or small office color printer! The MP980 boasts advanced technology in the form of ChromaLife100+, a six color ink system that uses a unique gray ink that provides better color values and more accurate tones for color and monochrome photos and documents. Vibrant color or sharp text don’t take long for the MP980 to churn out, it can print a 4 x 6-inch color photo in 20 seconds!
General Features:
- Stylish All-in-One Photo Printer
- All-in-One Printer, Scanner, Copier, Photo Printer
- Canon FINE inkjet technology (Full-lithography inkjet Nozzle Engineering)
- ChromaLife100+ 6-color ink system
- Includes gray ink for better quality monochrome prints
- Maximum ink droplet size: 1 picoliter
- Prints 4 x 6 photos at 9600 x 2400 dpi² resolution in 20 seconds
- 4800 dpi high resolution CCD scanner for documents and film
- White LED eliminates warm-up time for document scanning
- USB 2.0 interface
- IEEE 802.11b/g Wireless (WiFi certified) connectivity
- Ethernet connectivity
- 3.5-inch color TFT LCD display
- Easy scroll wheel
- Digital Media Card Reader
- Auto Duplex Print
- PictBridge support
- Exif Print support
- Supports Bluetooth with optional adapter (not included)
Printer Features:
- Print Speed (up to)
- Color Photo: 4 x 6-inch borderless photo: approximately 20 seconds
- Black: Up to 26 ppm (as fast as 2.3 seconds per page)
- Color: Up to 21 ppm (as fast as 2.9 seconds per page)
- Number of Nozzles: Black: 512; Color: 5,632; Total: 6,144
- Picoliter Size (color): Picoliter Size:1, 2 and 5
- Print Resolution (up to)
- Black: 600 x 600 dpi²
- Color: 9600 x 2400 dpi²
- Paper Sizes: Letter, Legal, 4 x 6, 5 x 7, 8 x 10-inches, U.S. -10 Envelopes
- Automatic Sheet Feeder: 150 Pages (Cassette:150 pages)
Dimensions:
- 7.9 x 18.5 x 15.2-inches (H x W x D)
- Weight: 23.6 lbs.
Price: $139.99
What’ in the Box?
This printer is a big boy and comes in a large, cumbersome box. You’re going to need a lot of free desk/shelf/counter space for this fellow.
There is a lot of good packaging inside the box and the printer seems to be protected very well. When you open the box, you’ll find the ink cartridges along the top, cables, as well as all the documentation. The printer uses two black inks, one gray, yellow, cyan and magenta. The included document and cable packages contain the driver CD, USB cable and power cord. The lovely folks at Canon even chuck in some paper samples for your to have fun with.
There’s a few more shots of the contents and ink cartridges, because they are just so fascinating to look at.
The printer itself, as I mentioned, is pretty big. It is, however, nice looking. It has a silver/black color scheme, has a good bit of weight to it, and isn’t made out of that super flimsy junk plastic that a lot of printers are made out of today. It comes wrapped in a huge plastic sack for even more protection.
The printhead is the last packaged part, found stashed within the front compartment of the printer. Let’s take a look at the rest of the physical elements of the printer’s exterior…
This printer has both a rear paper feed and a cassette on the bottom, allowing you to store paper in two locations. This is nice as it lets you hold twice the amount of paper, and you also have the option of choosing one feed or the other. Since this printer is so large, you can choose to use only the cassette and detach the rear feed slide, cutting down on space.
On the front-right corner of the printer is a small door that opens to reveal a card reader. As you can see in the picture, it supports standard card types. Underneath that door on the black base of the printer is a USB port.
Here is the rear of the printer, and also the power input on the back left corner.
The rear-right corner of the device has a USB input and ethernet input.
The top of the printer has a flip-up LCD screen where you manage all the settings and options for the printer. It is located on top of the panel that flips up to reveal the scanner.
The scanner has a white panel on the top which you can remove to see the negative scanning accessory.
Lifting up yet another level, under the scanner, is how you get into the inside of the printer.
Now that you’ve seen everything there is to see with the physicality of the MP980 and are ready for a printer anatomy test, let’s take a look at how the bad boy functions. Giving up this much desk real estate for a printer is only worth it if the thing can produce a quality print.
Usage:
Installing the print head and ink tanks is as easy as with any inkjet, and the LCD screen will guide you through the process. It will also indicate whether or not everything is installed correctly, which is a nice feature.
When you pop in the installation CD, it will automatically boot up and guide you through the installation process. There isn’t anything special to do here, as it’s basically just a series of clicking through the menus and allowing the software to do its job. The 10 to 20 minutes it claims installation will require is bogus – my machine had the entire processed finished in no more than 3.
After all the software is installed, it will ask you to set up your printer via the connection method you intend to use. You can connect via USB like any normal printer, via an ethernet cable attached to your network, or via wireless. For the purpose of this review, we’ll take a look at wireless. I did hook up the printer via USB and it worked immediately at this point after the software install, so if you intend to go that route, your setup is already finished. If you intend to connect via ethernet, you will simply have to hook up your cable and click next, allowing the software to authorize your printer on the network. For wireless, there are a few more steps. They involve setting up your printer on your network while it is connected via USB, then removing the USB cable at the appropriate time.
If you are running Windows 7 and have your firewall enabled, you may get a compatibility issue warning when moving forward with the setup process. Go ahead and ignore it, and you likely won’t see it again. This installation was done on Windows 7 32-bit.
The software will scan for available networks and ask you which one you want to use. If your network has security encryption, you’ll need to select the one you want and then enter the key for authorization.
It will then do its dance between the computer and the printer. You won’t see anything happening on the printer’s LCD panel during this process, but everything appearing on-screen should be reliable.
Once it completes, it will let you know that it has made a successful connection between the network and printer. You will then have to turn off the printer, remove the USB cable and turn it back on. Then it’s more clicking through windows as the setup finalizes.
The first thing it will do is check the signal health between your printer and network access. I set up the printer about four feet from my wireless router, so connection was not a problem. It did, however, fail to get a signal between the devices on the first attempt.
After the first fail, I chose to remeasure the connection, and it worked perfectly the second try. It did take a solid two minutes to measure the connection strength, which seems a bit long, but this isn’t something that has to be done too often so it’s no big deal.
After clicking next another time or two, setup was complete. I then immediately printed a document from Word with no problem.
As a side note – the whole setup procedure does install quite a few icons on your desktop. It’s a lot of clutter you may want to delete.
I’ve been informed that installing this printer on Windows 7 64-bit does not go quite as smooth, at least with the drivers that come on the installation disc. There is a separate set of drivers available on the Canon website that are required for 64-bit users to install. Once they are downloaded, everything runs just as smoothly as above.
The printer does an awesome job of printing text. It is fast, quiet, crisp and clear. The quality is very good, particularly for inkjet.
But printing text is only one thing this printer does well. There are a ton of options and settings in this thing – more than I could possibly get into in a single review. You can do everything from print from a mobile phone to printing graph paper templates and sending scans directly from the printer to an email attachment.
I decided to test out the scanner by doing two things – first by scanning a photograph and having it print out on photo paper, and by scanning something into the computer. Those are two chocies – you can also turn a scan into stickers, scan something directly onto a memory stick or card inserted into the printer, print a sheet of thumbnail-sized photos, and tons more. Basically anywhere you want your scan to go, it can.
When you scan a photo, it gives you all sorts of choices on what to do with it. I chose to scan it and print onto a 4×6” sheet of glossy photo paper included with the printer. The LCD screen gives you a preview of the picture, which is awesome, and allows you to edit it and select how you want to print. It scans very quickly, prints very quickly, and does so with great quality.
The photo doesn’t do it complete justice, but the one on the bottom is the scanned/printed version, and the top one is the original. In real life, the colors are very close to exactly the same, and I’d have a hard time distinguishing between the two if I didn’t know better.
Next, I chose to scan the cover of an old classic childrens’ book. I chose to send the scanned image to the PC. After the scan, it automatically opened up software allowing me to do an intense amount of things with my newly-scanned image. I chose to turn it into a PDF and look at it full-screen.
Here is the scanned book cover. It looks fantastic.
Overall, I’m very impressed with everything this printer can do and how it does it.
Conclusion:
Everything the printer can do is easy and functions as you’d want it to. The settings and steps aren’t complicated, they don’t require and special knowledge or technical skill to do, and this makes it a high-quality, user-friendly printer. It’s definitely one of the best inkjet All-in-Ones that I’ve seen in a long time.
Since it can be hooked up via straight USB, ethernet or wireless, it is suitable for nearly every situation. If you’re running a 64-bit operating system, installation may give you a bit of a hassle, but if not the setup couldn’t be simpler. Getting networked devices to function properly isn’t always the simplest task, but this printer made it easier than a lot of devices I’ve come in contact with recently.
The printer is fast, quiet, and the quality is excellent. It scans quickly, copies quickly, and gives you so many options with what you can do with your files and scans that it seems a very efficient and helpful piece of equipment.
If you’re looking for a capable All-in-One that will only run you about $140 brand new, then this baby is the way to go.
| PROS | CONS |
| +Great print quality and speed +Tons of options +Responsive, user-friendly LCD screen and menus +Great software +Well-made |
-Pretty big -64-bit users need to download extra software |
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Awesome job with this review! Love the pictures too.