Canon ImageClass MF8050Cn

It's not a functional office network printer

It has an Ethernet card but it is necessary to manually enter commands on the printer console to print anything other that a standard 8.5 x 11 page. Manual entries are also required for scanning functions. In order to get the scanner to work I had to use the USB connection as well as the LAN connection. Only the very basic commands for 8.5 x 11 page setup in MS word are recognized by the printer. Most other functions are done from the printer console with buttons and memory trees. It's a method that's ok for setting functions on a digital watch but it is rather crude for an expensive printer. These limitations definitely exclude it's role from being anything but a very large desktop printer. If used in an office environment it's use as an all-in-one would be limited to a single user.

The software packaged with the printer is the worse I have ever seen packaged with a printer in 25 years. Installation manuals were poor and the installation wizard did not recognize the printer. Needless to say, the installation process was long and frustrating.

Canon fodder

We replaced our excellent but aged Canon 1080 with a MF8050Cn a few months ago. Recurrent glitches identical to those described by other reviewers plus excessive ink consumption have been big disappointments. Having always tried to remain loyal to Canon, and having been the happy owner of excellent cameras, lenses, binoculars, office equipment, etc., I am having a hard time coming to the realization that Canon now has joined Toyota, Sony, Samsung, Chevrolet, Westinghouse, Packard, etc., ad nauseum in the race to the bottom of the barrel in pursuit of the almighty bottom line. In the book, The Coming China Wars, the author makes the point that the quality of everything has suffered because of the "China price", which forces all makers and producers to cut quality corners in order to compete. They usually do so by letting China produce their product. We were all suckered into believing that if it was Asian, it must be fairly high quality. Most of us now know better. Is it too late to turn back the clock and repeat the formula that allowed America to become the factory floor for the world two generations ago? We captured that title by producing good products at a good price, and took the global market from Great Britain. Now it's being done to us by China. Except they have left quality out of the equation and have created a new equation. You don't get the world to beat a path to your door by making a better mousetrap, but by making a cheaper mousetrap.

No PCL support

I was leaning towards this copier until I've found that the printing part has no PCL support. Unacceptable. Samsung has PCL.

Canon 8050 Cn

Very easy to setup and connect to network. Scanner speed to USB media stick is excellent and efficient. The printer noise is slightly high, but not so loud that one cannot carry on a conversation. There is "power up" from sleep mode time delay, approximately 2 minutes, not too bad. In a small business environment, this printer is great because it does FAX, scan, color print and copy. One can get basic machine info and configuration by using web browser interface, simply type in the IP address into the URL . My only slight criticisms are the following. Support documentation is weak, not very Mac friendly (cannot scan using network using Mac, Wintel you can), stingy OEM ink cartridges, color replication needs to be tweaked for proper color matching.

Excellent for the price!

We bought this copier for a department in the company. We only had it for about a month, we use it very light but so far so good. The colors are excellent, the feeder is fast. The quality of the copies are very good we love it. We still need to learn to use the scanner. We like the feature that if it is not in use it goes to energy saving mode.

not ready for primetime

I bought this printer over better reviewed color laser multi-functions because of my good experience with the b&w Canon MF4270. my large format color HP died, so now I needed color and color MF's had scaled in price and size. Setup was easy enough, although the menus were deep and complicated. just finding how to set up Distinctive Ring required a call to tech support and I never call tech support. But I felt better when the question stumped two techs. Then the problems began, the next morning the machine disconnected from the USB connection after entering 'Sleep' mode requiring a reboot of the printer. Then I spent two hours a day with Canon tech support, every day since receiving the printer and they couldn't fix it. Next I was unable to set paper defaults, every print job involving the MF tray requires user input and I couldn't print more than one page of anything (checks, letterhead, etc) because placing more than one sheet in the MF tray causes a 'jam' every single time. Canon clearly states this possible but in reality it does not work. Canon's solution to turn off any default thereby requiring direct input from me to menu thru and tell the printer what kind of media I was inserting. Crazy, right? you must also 'wake' the printer to begin any task except receiving faxes. it's also really noisy, a print job finishes and printer grinds on and on. I will say the color output was excellent.
I returned it and now have a Brother MFC9320CW that does everything with zero input on my part and it's wireless and a couple of bucks cheaper.

New Canon

I thought this MFP would be a little easier to use from reading pre-reviews and Canon's hype. It takes a while to wake up and is quite noisy. In order to use an envelope one has to fumble through the LCD menu to set it for envelopes. Print quality is good but it certainly takes a a while to spit out the 1st page. I had to turn the sleep mode timer all the way up so it doesn't take as long. If you have this in your work area, expect it to be noisy. When I print from a network printer I cannot do any other task on that computer until the job finishes spooling, quite annoying, none of our other network MFPs cause that. It is a competitively priced unit initially but a complete toner change is 72% the cost of a new rig. I think I would spend the extra money on a higher end unit, I like our Brother MFP but it was black & white and we needed a splash of color.

So Far So Good

I have had this unit for about a month. Being that is a brand new line for Canon the support has been a little slow. Still waiting to learn how to scan legal sized docs. For now I have to Copy and reduce to letter size to get all the info without being cropped. The only other complaint is that while the unit is working it is quite loud. Luckily once it has finished the job it goes silent. The color replication is better than I have seen in other units by far. Most photo copies are indistinguishable from the original color wise. The fax works fine and as a printer it is fast and efficient. Like the title says, so far so good.