Product Listing

Canon PIXMA MX886 All-In-One Printer - An Office Thoroughbred

By Ng Chong Seng - 16 May 2011
Launch SRP: S$499

Design & Setup

Design Matters

At about 49 cm wide, 45 cm deep and about 22 cm tall, the Canon PIXMA MX886 has a very manageable footprint. With all the trays closed, the printer takes on a boxy shape. At 11.7 kg, it's not exactly light, but it does house five ink tanks and an auto duplex unit. Take note though, the largely glossy exterior makes it a huge fingerprint magnet. In fact, out of the box, you'd notice a fair bit of tape protecting these glossy bits.

When you setup the printer for the first time, it would take a good 10 minutes to complete the initial print head alignment routine. The ample 3.0-inch LCD would provide helpful illustrations to guide you through the steps. After which, just pop in the bundled installation disc to install the necessary drivers and software. You can connect the AIO to the computer directly using a USB cable, or over a wired LAN using an Ethernet cable, or wirelessly over Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) and Windows Connect Now (WCN) wireless authentication methods are supported.

On the software side, MP Navigation EX works mainly with scanned documents: you could classify and view them in categories, extracts text to a .TXT file, and password protect your PDF files, among others. On the other hand, Easy-PhotoPrint EX deals mainly with your digital photos. For example, you could import photos directly from Flickr, and use them to decorate photo albums, calendars, and stickers. Easy-WebPrint EX is a webpage-clipping and printing software. You can do a lot of nifty things with it, such as rearranging the layout and inserting your own images before printing, and making an A5-sized booklet out of the materials you've "clipped". The MX886 also comes with Canon's Full HD Movie Print function. This allows you to print snapshots out of videos shot with compatible Canon digital cameras.

It's common these days for printer makers to have accompanying apps for mobile devices. Canon's answer is the Easy-PhotoPrint app; and it's available for the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, as well as Android devices. Best yet, the app is free.

 

Control Panel

 

 Appropriately, the more commonly used buttons are of a bigger size. These include the Copy, Scan, Fax and Card controls on the left, and the Start buttons on the right. There are 16 more buttons beside the LCD screen that light up only the commands necessary for each mode. When the AIO is turned off, the buttons are not illuminated, rendering the device a nice piece of furniture.
Notice that the numeric keypad now appears under fax mode. Under print, copy or scan mode, navigation keys appear instead. This arrangement worked well in general during our testing, other than that one time when we tried to print 50 copies of a document. Since the numeric keypad didn't appear, we had to press the plus key many times. A minor nuisance, though hardly deal breaking.

 

 

Body Elements

 

The MX886 uses five separate ink cartridges. The print head is packed separately in the box as well, and which you've to install before inserting the ink tanks. You can find more details about the consumables from the table below. Other than the 150-sheet cassette at the base, there are two more ways to load paper: the 150-sheet rear tray and the 35-sheet ADF. Auto duplex (two-sided) document scanning and copying can be done using the ADF.
The Ethernet (10/100 Mbps), USB 2.0, and telephone ports can be found at the bottom left at the rear of the AIO. The built-in fax modem uses the Super G3 standard. Naturally, you can use the ADF for a multi-page fax job. You can bypass the computer for printing documents and photos using the USB port (PictBridge-enabled too) and memory card slots. With the optional BU-30 Bluetooth adapter, you can print photos wirelessly from a Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone.

 

Ink Cartridges

The Canon PIXMA MX886 uses a total five inks - four dye-based and one pigment-based. The pigment black ink is easily recognizable from its wider set of nozzles. When printing on plain paper, the pigment black ink should result in darker blacks (important for text) and minimal smearing if the paper gets wet.

Replacement Consumables
Type Model Price
Pigment Black PGI-725BK S$20.90
Dye Cyan CLI-726C
S$19.50 (each)
Dye Magenta CLI-726M
Dye Yellow CLI-726Y
Dye Black CLI-726BK
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8.5
  • Design 8.5
  • Performance 8.5
  • Features 8.5
  • Value 8
The Good
Good print and copy speeds
Very dark text output
Excellent photo print quality
The Bad
Fingerprint-prone due to glossy exterior
Slow duplex print speeds
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