Canon ImageClass MF8350cdn

Too expensive to keep

The good:

This printer was very easy to set up. It is fairly easy to operate, although I generally use the software controls for print quality (i.e., density, saturation, contrast, etc.) instead of the controls on the printer itself. One reviewer notes that the photo print quality is not as good as an inkjet. Well, what inexpensive laser printer does? Maybe if you buy a 5000 - 10000 one you would get that, but I have NEVER seen a mid-range, small-office laser printer that prints photos as well as a cheap inkjet printer.

Printing is very fast. The print quality for non-photos is excellent. For photos it is still pretty good, especially if you tweak the software settings to increase the color saturation and contrast. And there are a lot of photo quality options to choose from.

I like the fact it automatically can do double-sided printing.

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The bad:

The toner is very, very expensive. Unfortunately, most of the 3rd party cartridges are very poor quality. They often leak all over the printer interior, or either fail completely upon install. Furthermore, Canon will not support the printer if you use the after-market cartridges.

The printer is quite heavy, so this may be a concern if it is to be moved around a lot.

Having to press the energy saver button to get it to show the controls once it goes blank is annoying. It should be the case that pressing ANY button wakes it up.

I do wish it had had wireless. This is going to be something that all printers eventually include -- too bad that Canon has not gotten it into very many of their printers the way Brother already has.

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We cannot afford to replace the cartridges. They cost more than the printer did. And since the after-market cartridges do not work, we are getting rid of this printer.

Average quality for normal users

I`ve only had this color copier for a week now. Here are my comments: I`m using this for personal use. Most people would have this in a business setting. Setup: Very Easy. Quick Guide is easy to use. I have my canon setup via USB cable. I haven`t tried networking it yet. Speed of printing: Very fast. I can print a 8x10 picture or several pictures on a 8 1/2 x 11 paper in about 15-20 seconds on Photo Matte Paper and Mild Glossy. I haven`t tried super glossy yet. Print Quality: Letters are crisp and clear. Photos are at average or below average at default settings. You will need to play around with the density of the toner to get identical picture quality from your monitor. I`m and advance user of copiers and I`ve gotten color tone almost exact. Scanner: The scanner is superb and very fast. A very nice feature of the scanning ability is to scan docs or pictures to your USB drive. Fax; I have no need for the fax feature. Pros: Best Buy has fast site to store delivery: 2 days Fast printing, scanning, Average print quality, duplex (2 side printing) Cons: Little noisy, but its a COPIER not a Printer. Toner is expensive for size of toner cartridge, but shop around for better deals. Photo quality ranks at 75-80 % at this time. Remember its a COPIER not a PHOTO PRINTER. Photo quality can be achieved with setting adjustments

Copy Counter Chip in Toner Cartridges (Update, 11/30/10)

I'm one unhappy customer.

I've had several laser printers before this one, and it's adequate in terms of its functions. However, the Canon seems to have created a business model that enables them to make most of their profits from the sale of replacement toner cartridges. In the past, I've gotten around this by buying a cartridge refill kit: you melt a hole in the side of the cartridge with a special tool, refill the cartridge with (much less expensive) toner, tape over the hole and you're on your way.

In this game of countermeasures and counter-countermeasures, Canon has now installed a counter chip in its cartridges. At a certain number of copies, the machine gives you an out-of-toner message AND JUST QUITS! No warning and no "light" copies to get you by.

When I attempted to refill the black cartridge, I discovered two things. First, it was more than half-full when the chip decided that it needed to be replaced. I'll control myself and refrain from disclosing my emotional reaction when I realized how much toner I was forced to throw away.

The second thing was that when I refilled the cartridge I expected, perhaps naively, that the cutoff device would sense that the cartridge was now full. OK, so maybe I was dropped on my head shortly after birth.

Some investigation has revealed that the chips are encrypted, such that third-party manufacturers haven't yet been able to create reasonably priced substitute cartridges or replacement chips to defeat the copy cut-off.

The bottom line is that I'm stuck paying on the order of $90 for each of four cartridges, three color and one black. The manufacturing cost for these cartridges is about $15. The company can make nothing on the actual machine and because of the rip-off profits on the consumable cartridges, finds the overall product line immensely profitable.

I've considered dropping this printer from the roof of my house, but it's so heavy that I'd have to set up a pulley rig.

Needless to say, I will be very careful when I replace this printer to make sure that I can refill the cartridges myself in the next brand that I buy.

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11/30/10 Update: I replaced the black toner cartridge only 2 months ago, and with fairly light usage, the display reports that the black cartridge's toner is low! The cartridge is half-full or more. However, the counter chip has caused the machine to stop printing AT ALL. No way around it.

Worse, When I print in B&W or color, the edges of the pages are smeared with reddish & yellowish colors. It's bad enough that it's making the copies hard to read. I use the printer at home and sometimes print documents to carry with me for later reading. Ugh!

The machine is out of warrantee, so I will have to pay for any repairs. Since estimates tell me that the cost of repair is a sizeable fraction of the cost of a new machine, I'm getting rid of it.

I'm planning to ship it back to Canon with a letter telling them two things.
1. I will never buy any other canon product.
2. They may keep the machine since to me, it's now a big, ugly, heavy, expensive paperweight.

Great for small offices, but very pricey

In a small office without servers, the MF8530's quality, speed, and silence might make it the perfect fit, but beware the price of toner per page. There are some nice features - it particularly sells itself on the basis of only taking a couple of seconds from cold to print - but for me those are outweighed by the negatives. I'm not a fan of older Canon multifunctions, and this reinforces that impression, though I was really hoping they'd improved.

Pros:
* The black prints are excellent, and the color prints are above average quality. Only Xerox is better.
* Huge address book, and can fax in color.
* Always quiet.
* Prints right away, no long loud warmup.
* Scans are clear and vibrant as long as they're flat, scans to PDF (only).
* Very thorough manual and a good quick-reference sheet.
* Never wastes color toner on b/w prints unless you change the settings.
Cons:
* It's among the heaviest and largest workgroup MFCs out there.
* Cannot scan to Email or a network share. This is our #1 missed feature, scan to USB doesn't cut it here.
* Toner is above average cost for an average page count. TCO is above average.
* No PCL or Postscript, both would be expected at this price.
* No private address books or secure printing.
* Menu and button layout is complex and the web interface is just plain bad, web configuration mirrors the regular menu.
* No warning for low toner. Just stops printing.
* There have been no firmware releases to fix bugs or add SMB/Email scanning, now a year after release. Apparently it won't happen.
* Took two days on the phone with tech support to get rid of a long beep every print, despite no error message and all sounds turned off. They finally told us to disconnect the speaker.

It's also annoying that you have to press the energy saver button every time you want to use the control panel. Every printer I've used except Canon lets you touch anything - but then every non-Canon MFC I've used lets you do network scanning. I'm peeved because we were told it has network scanning, but it turns out that mean starting Canoscan from the local PC, pointing it to the printer, and clicking scan. In the meantime you have to drop your paper off, go back to your PC and do it, then go pick the sheet up again. Thumb drive scanning doesn't make up for this, that has its own inconveniences. Obviously they prefer to artificially segment their markets, and haven't caught up to Sharp, Samsung, Xerox, or even HP at the low end featurewise. Unfortunately my boss bought this over competitors' offerings assuming that more expensive is better.

The printer would cost more to return than it's worth, so I'll update later with reliability information.

Disappointing Performance for the Cost

I purchased this in Jan '10 for my small business. Overall, I wish I'd never bought it and I'm disappointed in its performance. I researched carefully prior to purchasing. I bought based on previous good experience with Canon and because it had Win7 drivers. My reason for buying new printer was I could not get Win7 driver updates for my perfectly good old laser printer. When I encountered problems, Canon tech support was very rude and unhelpful - essentially told me I'd purchased a low end model and was expecting too much (I wanted it to print a standard business logo in the right color - not a photograph - just a standard business logo) Never mind that a Xerox Phaser printer has no trouble with it nor do any of the ink jet printers we've used. I spent hours reading the manual, trying to adjust the colors but finally gave up.

Pros:
- It's very fast once it gets going and print quality seems good on most things
- Ink cartridges seem to last awhile

Cons:
- Aside from not printing our logo, it cannot print colors accurately from what you see on the monitor either.
- When it runs out of any ink, it stops working - will not do anything
- There is no warning that you are going to run out of ink until it happens - there should be an option to have it show up on your computer screen or flash red or give warning in display. The toner gauge is only indicator and it's annoying to have to manually check something like this. Again, no other printer I've had does this.
- It is very, very noisy - don't plan to talk on the phone if you're printing something
- It is very, very heavy and bulky - big footprint
- If you want to download something and print it cheaply, it takes many steps to make the Canon do it in B&W as the color print is automatic.

Overall, because I could not return it for a different model, I kept the printer and purchased a cheap ink jet to print anything that requires our logo to be in color. So it has turned out that the ink jet does most of the printing in our office these days - not the $600 Canon color laser. Which is probably why it seems like the ink is lasting so long. Canon didn't do a very good job with this printer.

Scanner failure

I bought this unit around the new year with the hope of bringing some organization to my home office. I was able to set it up and start using it very quickly (less than an hour, even counting the time required to unbox it). I wanted to be able to print from several devices on my network, so I plugged it into my router and followed the simple instructions. As a network printer, it works extremely well for me. I can print from my mac laptop, from my main desktop and from other wireless devices (such as friends' laptops) that I add to my network from time to time.

However, I was also really looking forward to using the scanner. When I first set it up, the scanner worked okay. The resolution is low (like 600x600) but adequate for scanning in documents. (Forget about trying to scan pictures or your kids' artwork, of course). Unlike the printer function, the scanner can only work with Windows boxes. No problem.

After a couple of weeks, when I scanned a document I got an error on the windows box I use as my primary workstation and scan destination. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers and all the usual voodoo that usually fixes stuff (all of this was incredibly time consuming). No luck, so I called Canon technical support.

I spoke with a nice guy who walked through a checklist of issues. I should add that I'm running a clean and plain-vanilla vista box. However, as soon as he found a step that I couldn't take---in my case, moving a windows scanner driver from one folder to another---he considered the case closed. Can't move twain.ds out of the folder? Not our problem any more. He advised me to contact the company who manufactured my computer, or Microsoft. I'm morally certain that when I do talk to these people they will blame Canon's drivers and bounce me back to their tech support. Why haven't I called them yet? Because it costs some ungodly amount to talk to live human, and there is nothing on the internet, the help boards, the FAQS, or Canon's own technical documentation to help me try to resolve this issue without talking to human.

So: nice unit, shame that it doesn't work. And even more shame that Canon has provided me with zero technical information to try to fix the problem myself.

Great Printer for All In One

This has to be the best all in on I've seen on the market. Full two sided color laser printing is fantastic. I use this to print high quality double sided listing flyers for my real estate business and people are amazed at the quality of the photos and it prints so quickly. For the price this is a tremendous value and I would recommend this to anyone After using it for a month I decided to buy another one for my office.

This is a non starter. The worst printer I have ever purchased.

This is hands down the worst printer and worst value for a printer I have ever experienced. I use a line of printers for my own work in professional photography and graphics, but also use all kinds of printers and devices when programming web sites.

Here's the summary:

- We had problem after problem with the toner. The machine ships with full toner cartridges (CMYK) and after 3 weeks the black toner was reported as empty. This was hard to believe but with a busy office had no choice but to order more and follow up with tech support. Within another 2 weeks again the black toner was being reported as empty. But as before, if you shake the thing around and put it back it you could eeck out more printing. Mind you, this is not an office that prints much from this machine each day. Mostly faxing and very light copying each day. NO direct printing from computers at all.
- Although I had the above printing issues, which became a panic issue because of faxes that were happening, I used the "continue to receive faxes even with low toner" option and this done pretty much nothing. My question is why can't the thing still print inbound faxes using the other 3 cartridges (CMY). Cyan and Magenta combine to make Blue which would be perfectly fine for printing inbound faxes.
- Cartridges cost about [...] each, so that's [...] for a full load of cartridges on this machine. This is probably about .05c per page for each cartridge on average, which is my guess based on the documentation and my discussion with tech support.
- The machine is really heavy, for whatever odd reason. I'm 5'11 230 and in great shape and this was still a heavy machine to move around.
- Unbelievably there is no built in wireless. You can buy a [...] inkjet with similar speed and cost/sheet and also get built in wireless.
- The on board controls just ... suck. There's no other word for it. The LCD is black and white (or white and black if you want to indulge in such a lush feature) and the menu options are so many levels deep Canon has to include a trifold explaining the menuing system.

The nice part of this story is that in a pinch I had to run out and buy an Epson Workforce 610 for about [...] from Sam's. It was easy to install, wireless is built in and a breeze, it's as fast or faster than the Canon behemoth, and the cost for ink is about the same. Do yourself a favor and either buy the Workforce 610 and save yourself [...], or if you really, really insist on paying the [...] let me sell you a 610 for [...] and you will be much happier. :)

Great Product at a competitive price

The features of this printer are awesome for the price, and I would highly recommend it. I purchased this product on sale for $569. I was also seriously considering the Brother DCP-9045CDN, which has slightly lower ink prices (with their high capacity cartridges), but I'm pretty sure that I won't regret sticking with the Canon brand. After purchasing several Canon products (including this one), I have a lot of respect for Canon's consistent product quality, customer service, features, and value.

This is my first home laser printer. I'm quite pleased to finally graduate from the world of inkjets: no more slow printing, annoying print head cleaning cycles, frequent cartridge replacement, or tedious management of print settings to save every drop of ink! The cost per page is about the same, but the reliability is so much better!

Some features that I really appreciate include:

1) Reliability: This printer always _just works_ when I need it to. Beats even the best inkjet printer out there. For my usage level, I fully expect to do zero maintenance or cartridge replacement within the next 2.5 years!
2) Speed: Wow, this thing makes quick work of any job!
3) All the little things that Canon gets right. Just one example: the print driver can automatically detect whether to use color or B&W mode...something I've always wanted a print driver to do for me!

The only notably missing features are:

1) The automatic document feeder only supports single-sided scanning/copying. So doing double-sided scan/copy requires manually flipping the stack and passing it through again.
2) No built in wireless.
3) Photo quality, while very good for a 600dpi consumer laser, is not competitive with inkjet-based photo printers. I still use this printer for many photos and am happy with the results, but I keep a second inkjet photo printer on the side for times when I really care about photo quality (i.e. scrapbooking, etc).

Although those features would be nice additions, I'm still very happy with what this machine can do for the price.

BTW, Canon's own online store had the best prices I could find for cartridges for this printer, with free shipping.