Product ReviewsPrinters
Several of Canon's range of all-in-one printers are designed for home and semi-pro photographers, and with the Pixma MP980, the company is further tailoring to this market by improving the black-and-white print quality of the machine. Its immediate predecessor, the MP970, used seven inks, adding a separate pigmented black for text, and photo cyan and photo magenta to its CMYK core for improved colour photos. This new machine uses six inks and only three of them are colour. This A4 printer is large, decked out in silver and black, and like its predecessor it has two paper trays. Here though, Canon intends the rear tray, which lifts up and hinges back from just behind the scanner lid, to be for photos, while the cassette that slides in underneath at the front is primarily for plain paper. The output tray is at the front, once you've folded down the front cover of the printer. Canon is proud of the design of its control panel, where a large 88mm LCD display folds up from the top cover of the scanner to reveal controls underneath. These include a digital click-wheel, which is a very easy way of navigating menus, as well as two soft-keys, linked to context-sensitive legends on the screen. Lift the scanner lid and a transparency adaptor is revealed, when you release a panel from its underside. There's no large-format backlight, only one for a strip of six negatives or four 35mm slides. Delve inside the MP980 from the front and a small fold-down cover reveals a slot for the supplied CD and DVD carrier. The machine supports direct printing on suitably coated disc blanks. At the back are sockets for USB 2 and Ethernet, but the most useful connection is probably 802.11g wifi, which again is standard on this machine. The setup is reasonably
As always, duplex print on a Canon inkjet is a tedious affair, as the machine pauses between each side of a double-sided page, to allow the ink to dry. The MP980 also rattles around doing housekeeping before starting each job, so even when it's not in sleep mode, you can easily wait 25 seconds before the first page is fed from the cassette. These hesitations mean that the top black text print speed we saw was under 6.5ppm, though colour print was very nearly as fast. Where the printer shines is in printing photos. After the usual pause for the first in a batch, it turns one out every 20 seconds or so. The MP980 uses six inks, forgoing the two photo colours for a grey. Canon feels the four standard colours give good enough colour photos and we wouldn't argue with this from our tests. The grey ink improves mid and light shades in black and white prints as, rather than relying on the whiteness of the paper with comparatively few black dots, in can now add grey dots as well, so the density of ink is increased. The samples we printed out from the machine are pretty good. Black text is clean and sharp, almost up to the standard of laser printers, and colour graphics are not overstated, with good registration of black text over coloured backgrounds. However, areas of solid colour are not as dense as they might be and colour photocopies are quite pale in comparison with originals. Photo prints are very high quality, with both natural hues and vivid colours where expected. Flesh tones, while perhaps not quite as responsive as with six colour inks, are acceptable for most uses. Greyscales, as you'd expect with the extra grey ink, are cleaner and more neutral than when working with a single black. With an ISO black page coming in at around 2.7p and 5.8p for an equivalent colour one, this machine is economical to run. Although the asking price is higher than that of its predecessor, the wireless networking built-in to the Pixma MP980 is a worthwhile bonus, as it gives you the flexibility to place the printer wherever it's most convenient. By Simon Williams
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
