Review of Canon USA (Lasers) Toner Cart BLK/MF8170C
You are probably thinking what I thought when I first encountered this machine “Yeah, right! A multifunction LASER COLOR unit for around $1000???? There has to be something wrong with it”. But then the Canon name give you pause, after all, Canon is known for their copiers and printers.
Well, believe it — you can have a color laser unit that prints and copies with quality and relative efficiency, plus the convenience of faxing and scanning and printing and copying from one machine for a very affordable price!
We bought this unit after much pondering of the available options. I run a small business with 3 employees. We do a fair amount of copying and faxing — haven’t tried the scanning feature. We have been using it for about 3 weeks.
We replaced a commercial leased regular copier that supposedly would have cost $7000 and regular old cheap fax machine and a cheap color inkjet.
We are very happy with the machine. The resolution and color of copies is excellent. I hadn’t thought that a color laser unit would be possible within our budget or that one that was would be of good quality. The unit is sturdy and obviously well-designed, Canon is almost peerless when it comes to printer/copier quality and experience. We ran it one day making hundreds of copies until we could feel the heat coming off it and it continued to perform flawlessly.
Features we especially like: 1) the sheet feeder takes paper face up — really nice to read the fax number from the cover sheet without twisting the paper around; 2) makes multiple copies without over-heating and jamming (as our commerical copier did on a regular basis); 3) the two paper trays which allow us to print on colored paper without forgetting that we replaced the white paper in the main tray and making useless copies until we realise the error 4) the convenience of an all in one often we are copying the same page that we are faxing, so it is convenient to only use one machine.
Features we don’t like 1) the lack of automatic two-sided copying
2) the unit is very large it is not really a table-top unless you have a large table it takes up most of the room on top of a regular vertical file cabinet — will not fit well on a regular file cabinet 3) home users might be bothered by the sounds and light eminating from the unit 4) horrible results attempting to print on glossy photo paper — prints decent pics on heavy weight non-photo paper 5) a little slow to start up if used episodically, but actually much much faster than our old commerical copier — users who are accustomed to home printers, which are immediately ready to work will need to adjust their expectations 6) You have to pay attention to which paper tray you have selected — it seems to switch to the alternate tray spontaneously.
Considering the price for quality laser printing, these issues are minor. It is not a photo printer and since it is easy to get an inexpensive photo printer, it doesn’t matter. I was willing to manually make two sided copies in order to be able to afford a laser copier/printer.
We got an inexpensive wireless attachment and now all three computers can share the unit without wires all over the place.
For a small office or home based office, the quality and price are unbeatable. The cartridges are expensive ($80-90 each) and I have not finished one yet, so I don’t know how many prints one can make per cartridge. There was no data on this with the unit or on Canon’s web site. This makes it difficult to assess cost per copy, but it is certainly less expensive for color prints and copies that those pricy ink-jet machines that just suck up the ink. And you get laser quality and resolution.
Since there were no problems, I can’t comment on customer service or technical issues. Installing the software was simple — we do not have a firewall — might be an issue for some users. Machine worked great, right out of the box!
Product Description
MODEL- EP-87BKVENDOR- CANON USA
FEATURES- EP-87 Toner Cartridge- Black
for use with the MF8170C, MF8180C
Yields 5,000 pages based on 5% coverage.
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